Eskom has stepped up efforts to curb theft and vandalism of its infrastructure as it battles to keep the lights on, CEO Andre de Ruyter said during his State of the System briefing on Monday.
“Our transmission network performance has seen a marked improvement, however, ongoing theft and vandalism of infrastructure continues to negatively impact operations.
“But we are embarking on several security enhancement projects on both our 5 Distribution and Transmission network to curb these criminal activities.”
The state-owned company was working with law enforcement agencies to ensure that the criminals were brought to book, he said.
“The recent sentencing of copper thieves to an effective cumulative 1 250 years in prison in the Western Cape, as well as last week’s sentencing to 12 years’ imprisonment of an Eastern Cape businessman for electricity theft through the illegal bypassing and interference with Eskom’s infrastructure, are positive developments that will serve as a deterrent to criminals.”
It’s estimated that copper theft costs the South African economy between R5 billion and R7 billion a year, while Eskom spends about R2 billion a year replacing stolen cables.
“Another sad reality of the matter is that infrastructure and electricity theft not only costs Eskom money, but may also result in the loss of lives of innocent people due to electrocution.”
Network overloading continued to be an area of great concern,” he added. “To protect electricity infrastructure in certain high-density areas that have high occurrences of illegal connections, Eskom continues to implement load reduction during peak times, when the most damage to our infrastructure occurs.”
And on the subject of loadshedding De Ruyter warned that this could be a fact of life for the next five years due to an electricity supply shortfall of approximately 4 000MW.
