Energy teams fix 10 000+ streetlights in just 30 days

18 May 2025

City energy teams attended to more than 10 000 streetlight-related requests between 26 March 2025 and 25 April 2025 as part of the enhanced streetlight focus initiative that was launched in 2024 and that has successfully eradicated service request backlogs and enhanced turnaround times. This is out of a total of almost 30 000 electricity-related service requests attended to.

'Vandalism, theft and illegal connections across the metro continue to impact turnaround times as damaged infrastructure often needs to be entirely replaced. The City's Energy Safety Unit continues to make a significant difference in our operations and much investment is under way to reduce the street value of materials by replacing copper cables with low street value conductors and rolling out overhead to underground cabling projects in communities across Cape Town. 

'Our Electricity Generation and Distribution Department has really made massive strides in enhancing service delivery despite incredibly difficult circumstances on the ground. With the launch of our multi-year anti-vandalism campaign, ‘Protect Your Power’, we are urging our communities to keep an eye on the power infrastructure in their communities and to help us by reporting suspicious activity as fast as possible. This will help to reduce the scale of the damage caused by the theft and vandalism.

'We manage more than 245 000 streetlights across the metro and every bit of help we can get goes a long way as we endeavour to create safer and brighter communities,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Energy, Alderman Xanthea Limberg.

Requests attended to per metro area - theft and vandalism remains the biggest driver of streetlight, and power outages: 
 

Let’s ACT: Protect Your Power

Report suspicious behaviour to the City’s Public Emergency Communication Centre: 021 480 7700

The SAPS remains the lead authority in crime prevention.

*Note: the data looks at all streetlight-related service requests closed over a particular two-week period. Data is dynamic and new requests are constantly added to the already logged requests, as well as historic service requests. The data looks only at streetlight-related requests and does not include other energy service requests attended to over the period in review.

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Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office