The City of Cape Town has been named top municipality in the African Utility Week Awards, partly for its quality of electricity and moves to save water.“It is a city that is serious about service delivery and planning. The City of Cape Town’s infrastructure planning for short-term, medium-term and long-term is at the highest level,” said programme director for African Utility Week, Nicolette Pombo-van Zyl.

Cape Town was up against the eThekwini and Nelson Mandela Bay municipalities.

The continent’s leading utility and energy professionals and projects were honoured at the awards ceremony. More than 5 000 power and water professionals have gathered in Cape Town this week for the fourteenth annual African Utility Week and Clean Power Africa conference and expo.

In nominating Cape Town for the award, Eskom and a private entity from the water sector said the quality of electricity provided to the end-user was “as good as you will receive at international level” while major and minor pressure management projects had resulted in a current annual savings of about 3.37-million cubic metres of water. This was worth about R31-million a year. 

The group executive of sustainability at Eskom, Dr Steve Lennon, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. Lennon has been with Eskom for more than 30 years and is widely recognized for his leadership both locally and internationally in areas ranging from technological innovation to the triple bottom line and climate change policy and strategy.

The winner of the City Energy/Water Efficiency Award was the City Power Solar Water Geyser project in Johannesburg.

“The project is a mayoral flagship project where we are rolling out over 110 000 low pressure solar geysers throughout Johannesburg, starting with the low income areas,” said City Power MD Sicelo Xulu. The project is halfway towards completion with over 45 000 geysers already installed.

Global metering giant, Itron, won top honours for the Community Project Award for its Water PlayPump programme at the Relekile Primary School in Kuruman, a very dry and arid area of the Kalahari.

The African Collaboration Award was given to the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). Its Zimbabwe-Zambia-Botswana-Namibia interconnector project was singled out as the only project in the SAPP that involves four countries. This was seen as a milestone achievement.