City Power’s Mondeor Switching Station in Johannesburg.
Power utility City Power has engaged Chinese tech giant Huawei to curtail electricity losses amounting to over R3 billion every year.
The City of Johannesburg entity is set to roll out Huawei’s Intelligent Distribution System (IDS), a solution designed to help curb network abnormalities, reduce rampant energy theft, and address technical losses.
The announcement was made by City Power’s chief operations officer (COO), Charles Tlouane, on Friday at the Huawei Global Electricity Power Summit held at the Shanghai Expo Centre in China.
Huawei says the IDS adopts the “cloud-pipe-edge-pipe-device” architecture and incorporates ICTs such as the high-speed power line carrier and the edge computing unit, delivering transparent sensing and proactive operations and maintenance.
It explains that this allows utilities to shorten the time taken to respond to faults, enhance distribution network resilience against extreme natural disasters, and boost user satisfaction.
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According to Huawei, to date, the IDS has been deployed on a large scale in China and has been piloted by more than 20 power distribution companies around the world.
“We asked one of our strategic partners to find us solution to curb technical and non-technical losses. They worked with Huawei to develop a proof of concept,” Isaac Mangena, City Power’s spokesman tells ITWeb.
Unacceptable financial losses
Tlouane believes this new system will revolutionise City Power’s electricity operations by reducing overall energy losses currently sitting at nearly 30%, to more acceptable levels of between 5% and 10%.
“City Power has been grappling with energy losses, both technical and non-technical, which remain among our biggest challenges. Technical losses, caused by system inefficiencies such as line losses and transformer imbalances, are around 9%. Non-technical losses, including theft, illegal connections, and billing challenges, are about 20%.
According to Tlouane, together, these have translated into a financial loss of approximately R3.6 billion every year.
“IDS is a game-changer as it will help detect problems downstream on our network, helps us identify customers involved in energy theft, monitors phase imbalances, and tracks reactive energy in real time. This enables us to act quicker and contain losses before they escalate,” said Tlouane addressing delegates at the summit.
He noted that this system will assist the power utility’s efforts to maintain sustainable delivery of electricity services to the people of Johannesburg.
“The entity has, over the past few month, been testing the IDS system where we sampled different customer categories in different areas of our supply including township of Tshepisong in the West Rand, a middle class suburb in Roodepoort, high-end customers in Bryanston, and a large power user in an industrial area. The IDS system is installed in a load centre such as a mini substation or transformer substation to monitor supply within a specific area.
“From the outcome of those pilot projects, we could identify that theft and electricity losses occur across all customer categories, not just in non-affluent areas but also in businesses and affluent suburbs, which is deeply concerning. IDS will, therefore, not only help curb theft but also assist in normalising the network, improving billing accuracy, ensuring the return of plants that had been taken out of service and to contain our losses to just under 10%,” Tlouane said.
According to City Power, the rollout will start in phases, with large power users as the first category, followed by businesses, before being expanded across the entire supply network.
It notes that this system, which will be implemented in the next five years will help in increasing revenue, which has been one of the utility’s major challenges.
It will also assist in reducing system loss and time it takes to restore power supply and improve on operation and maintenance.
“We are first going to deploy IDS solution to address system losses and loss of distributed energy and extend to more areas of distribution grid operation. It should enable City Power to move from a single point of digitalisation to open sustainable and systemic digitalisation to continuously improve efficiency, ensure safe, and reliable operations of a distribution Power grid. This will also help to achieve our vision of providing sustainable, affordable, safe reliable supply of electricity to all customers,” said Tlouane.
“We are confident that the IDS programme will significantly improve our financial sustainability, service reliability, and customer trust, while also aligning Johannesburg with global trends in smart grid technology.”
In addition to IDS, the entity is also building electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at all its service delivery centres across the city, with the EV fleet expected to be launched in the coming weeks.
