Cape Town’s smart electricity system

The City of Cape Town has implemented smart systems to control infrastructure, minimise excessive resource consumption, and control crime.

Cape Town recently announced the launch of its pump station control room’s digital hub, which will be used to track water and sanitation infrastructure. The investment cost over R7.4 million.

This new system allows staff to monitor 401 sewer pump stations, 58 water pump stations, and 60 reservoirs around the city. When an issue arises outside of business hours, it contacts response teams via SMS.

“The tracking system is helping to quickly dispatch teams to attend to infrastructure performance issues,” Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said.

Another initiative employing smart systems is the Metro Police Strategic Surveillance Unit’s (SSU) 39 CCTV projects currently underway.

The most significant of these projects in 2023 involved installing CCTV cameras along Baden Powell Drive, costing R4.2 million.

Following Cape Town’s Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s announcement of an infrastructure budget of R39.5 billion for the next three years, MyBroadband reached out to the City to determine how this budget would contribute to similar smart infrastructure projects.

“On the energy front, the City has a mega Mayoral Priority Programme to diversify energy resources and to open up the energy grids,” the City’s mayoral committee member for energy, Xanthea Limberg, said.

“There are a host of initiatives including energy wheeling, new power procurement and online trading platforms for the procurement and own-build projects.”

She noted that R4 billion of the infrastructure budget will be spent on power infrastructure over the next three years to reduce the City’s reliance on Eskom.

A tender has been awarded for a 7 MW solar plant in Atlantis, which is expected to feed into the grid by 2025, following 12 months of construction that is set to begin this year.

As part of this initiative, the City has also invested in 100 power-lite municipal buildings that have saved R84 million, 72.5 MW, and 71,800 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over 12 years.

This was thanks to three things implemented in each building: the installation of LED lighting, a retrofit of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and smart metering.

The smart metering uses Smart Facility, a web-based data application that captures municipal buildings’ water and electricity consumption.

“Smart Facility illustrates the data on several dashboards to facility managers and management staff for proactive monitoring and management of municipal facility consumption,” the city said.

Investment into this type of infrastructure is said to continue, although the MMC did not say how much is being allocated.

The city’s energy security has come under threat as of late, according to Limberg, who said that increased tampering with electricity meters linked to Eskom price hikes could lead to supply disruptions in the future.

“The way that it impacts the city and its residents is significant in that it does mean that there are electricity losses, and we cannot obtain the income to sustain the service,” Limberg said.

“It also makes it incredibly difficult from a data perspective to understand the supply that we need to meet our demand, without which it becomes difficult to maintain the grid and can lead to supply disruptions.”

Limberg said the increase in tampering with electricity metering devices has been “largely linked to soaring energy costs driving South Africa’s cost of living crisis, impacting all residents and especially vulnerable households.”

Eskom’s electricity price hike for local authority tariffs increased by 12.72% on 1 July this year and will remain in effect until 30 June 2025.