Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba says there is a way for the city to never again experience electricity outages as a result of problems at Eskom.

In addition to spending on repairs to substations and switching cables from copper to aluminium to prevent theft, he wants to go private by striking a deal with the Kelvin power station - an independent power producer.

"If our residents are paying for it, and it is not being generated by Eskom, there is no rational basis to preventing us from using the 200MW produced at Kelvin to mitigate the crippling effects of load-shedding," the mayor said in his state of the city address on Tuesday.

"This is the equivalent of what we have to shed in Johannesburg, during stage 2 load-shedding."

Mashaba said the city had a contract with Kelvin during previous rounds of load-shedding. However, Eskom withdrew from funding this arrangement and in December told the city it could no longer offset its load-shedding requirements with the power generated in Kelvin.

"I have initiated a team of people from the city to meet Eskom to inform them that we will offset our load-shedding with the power produced by Kelvin. Should this not be achieved, I have informed our legal teams of my intent to go to court with Eskom so that we can mitigate load-shedding in Johannesburg."

Mashaba said a team from the city was also meeting Kelvin managers "to see whether a new contract can be negotiated that would see their output increased, and sold to the city at a cheaper rate than Eskom's".

If this is achieved, the city would have the licence to procure 600MW from Kelvin, he said, "which has the ability to prevent all load-shedding up to and including stage 6".