Cape Town: The Energy Directorate team of the City of Cape Town conducted the essential streetlight maintenance and refurbishment visit along key arterials throughout the metro. This formed a part of continuous year-round programme to maintain and upgrade the public lighting infrastructure.
It is an essential investment by the City of Cape Town in the upgradation and maintenance of the public lighting infrastructure that has extended beyond December. This forms part of a continuous programme by the Energy Directorate to enhance their safety and visibility throughout the metro.
Member of the Mayoral Committee for Energy – Alderman Xanthea Limberg joined the officials at numerous sites across the city this week, where the high-mast maintenance work of the streetlight took place.
The Energy team is actively working in various areas across the metro as part of the year-round public lighting programme. The City of Cape Town maintains a network of over 245,000 streetlights and through significant investment it includes a R75.5 million streetlight capital budget for the 2025-26 financial year. The Energy Directorate continues to deliver an extensive maintenance with its team to work around 8,000 streetlight-related service requests every month.
Limberg expressed that they are pleased with the hard work of their teams, which has driven an impressive recovery in the streetlight burn rate, which now sits at 88.8% and is on track to exceed the 90% target. They also extended the appreciation to other stakeholders like the Western Cape Provincial Government, who are actively rolling out their own streetlight repair programme on provincial roads.
While teams remain on the ground to attend to infrastructure maintenance and repairs, vandalism and theft of critical infrastructure remain a challenge. The most recent electricity infrastructure vandalism and theft figures indicate that 805 theft and vandalism incidents were reported during the third quarter of 2025 across all areas, with an estimated repair cost of approximately R16 million. The Area North of the city reported 380 incidents, Area South reported 260 incidents, and Area East reported 165 incidents.
The Energy department continue to appeal to residents to assist them by reporting any suspicious activities near energy infrastructure to both the South African Police Service and the City so that they can bring an end to infrastructure theft and vandalism. The City has deployed security to monitor hotspot areas where possible, replacing copper with lower street value alternatives and they are piloting innovative infrastructure protection tech solutions. The City can’t go at it alone. They rely on the communities to alert them and to help them in protecting the community infrastructure.