​To adhere to the COVID-19 regulations for the safety of staff and customers, the City’s Electricity Generation and Distribution Department had to reorganise operations and turnaround times. Due to the resultant reduced capacity, the Department prioritised multiple streetlight outages, power outages and instances where electricity faults was a safety hazard to members of the public. Some service requests were therefore flagged for later attention as soon as it was possible to attend to, such as some single streetlight outages requests.

‘In the more than four months between 27 March 2020, when Level 5 Lockdown started, and 2 August 2020, the City’s Electricity Generation and Distribution Department has attended to almost 90 000 service requests. The Department was able to attend to these thousands of service requests while taking the necessary safety precautions including social distancing, wearing of masks and regular hand sanitising.

‘Street lighting, especially single street lights that are out, is one area where we have received many complaints from residents, however due to the continuing priority work were unable to attend to. The Department is also clearing a backlog of requests that it could not attend to due to the priority work. Customers may have also noticed that the City’s usual fast turnaround times were sometimes affected because of COVID-19 and the lockdown. We have also had depots that have had to close, like our Wynberg depot, which has affected the turnaround times of attending to service requests. The City thanks customers for their patience while the City’s staff works through the remaining service request backlogs. We are doing our absolute best and continue to work nonstop,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Energy and Climate Change, Councillor Phindile Maxiti.

The Department will work hard to bring this turnaround time down from the current COVID-19-required two weeks’ turnaround time to the one or two days residents had become used to. This will occur over a reasonable period of time, given the extent of the impact COVID-19 has had on our operations. The fixing of individual streetlights will also be phased in again over the next few weeks.

Contact us:
SMS: 31220 (electricity faults)
Email: power@capetown.gov.za

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