The challenge facing Johannesburg residents is no longer the two-hour outage. It is the outage that lasts all day.
Joburg's growing problem with cable theft, vandalism, equipment failures and ageing infrastructure has changed that equation. While City Power says customers are spending less time without electricity than they were a year ago, its latest figures still show an average interruption duration of around 14 hours.
More than a million customer interruptions were recorded in a single quarter, illustrating the scale of Johannesburg's electricity reliability problem even as load shedding faded into the background. That is long enough to expose the limits of many of the backup systems households bought during the load-shedding years.
City Power's first quarter report shows it continues to face significant energy losses with an infrastructure backlog of R44 billion. Roughly 60% of outages stem from ageing equipment – some of it nearly a century old. A further 20% are caused by theft and vandalism, 15% by external factors such as Eskom faults and third-party damage, and 5% by network overload, particularly in informal settlements.
There are signs of improvement. The number of outages fell by about a fifth between the April-to-June and July-to-September quarters, and the average time a customer spent without power dropped from just over 24 hours to just over 14.
