After nine long years, Johannesburg’s City Power has opened the newly constructed Eldorado Park Substation. This comes after the completion of the project experienced corruption and several contractual issues during the construction process.
The power entity officially opened the newly upgraded substation on Tuesday.
Newly elected Joburg mayor, Dada Morero, MMC for environment and infrastructure Jack Sekwaila, City Power chief executive Tshifularo Mashava were part of the delegation as officials unveiled the 4x45MVA 88/11kV transformers, an upgrade from the existing 3x45MVA 88/11kV.
Work on the upgrades started back in March 2015.
The substation will supply power to Eldorado Park, Nancefield, and Klipspruit, and nearby areas.
Addressing the local residents, Morero acknowledged that the reconstruction of the substation started nine years ago and was later halted due to corruption activities.
“We started this project just around 2015, and the project was halted around 2016 with fraudulent issues and corruption.”
Morero said that the matter was then investigated, and resulted in some people being arrested.
“Some of those are still going to court even today, including the service providers,” he said.
He urged residents of Eldorado Park and surrounding areas to protect the infrastructure of the substation.
“You have the responsibility to protect and defend this infrastructure so that once it is affected, it means that it is (you) the communities who are also going to be affected,” said Morero.
Additionally, Sekwaila echoed Morero’s statement that the project experienced significant challenges that affected its completion.
Sekwaila said he hopes that the substation would bring about a sigh of relief to the residents as they have been enduring power supply issues.
“The area has been largely affected by power related issues for quite some time. But, we must then urge our community to take care of this station,” he said.
Mashava said she was relieved the project was now complete.
“The substation is linked with Nancefield and Nirvana Substation networks, enabling City Power to provide a backfeeding channel in cases of outages,” Mashava explained.
South Africa has not experienced any load shedding for about five months.
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