Anchua Naruseb

Failure by power technicians to supply the right amount of electricity to the new housing development in Mariental has caused regular electricity blackouts in the southern town. 

This is according to the CEO of Mariental, Paul Nghiwilepo, who said part of the town has had power outages due to an oversight by technicians.

The hot spot for these outages has been the new extension that has been in the works since 2017.

The new extension has been a housing project by the municipality of Mariental in partnership with Dynamo Property Developers to construct up to 209 residential houses to combat the housing backlog in the township.

These houses are constructed to home ultra-low, low and middle-income groups.

“The newly developed extension has overloaded the grid and that is something our technical team had not taken into consideration,” said Nghiwilepo.

Nghiwilepo also added that the power outages mostly occur during peak hours, around the morning and evening where residents use the most electricity.

“Recently, we had outages due to overload in certain areas as the town itself is growing and residents require more electrical appliances. We increased our fuses and breakers to counteract this problem,” said Mariental municipality electrician, Kevin !Gonteb.

Power outages have been a regular occurrence around Mariental since February as the town had experienced the worst thunderstorm in decades.

“The outages we had during that time were due to lightning damages on our mini subs, transformers and cables. We lost eight transformers and two mini subs during this time, including two high voltage cables, which were damaged by lighting surge. All these faults were rectified after occurring,” said !Gonteb.

The damage caused by the lightning storms in February exceeded N$600 000.

!Gonteb, however, stated that some of the outages of recent have been arranged for maintenance purposes.

“Mariental municipality does inform all its customers via radio, newspapers, notice boards and its social media platforms on all outages and the duration of outages,” !Gonteb added.

“Just to ease the pressure from the existing transformers, we are currently in the process of installing a new transformer to rectify this,” said Nghiwilepo.

Nghiwilepo predicts that by November or December the power outages will be eliminated.