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Happy Monday to you, too.
I trust you had a restful one, so let’s dive straight into the muck that is the current state of South Africa’s power utility.
At present, we are not due to be hit with load shedding today but EskomSePush lists the system as “still constrained”.
That’s scant relief when you consider the big picture, laid bare by City Press this weekend, because the worst is still to come.
Eskom expects 295 days of load shedding in the 12 months from April 1 to the end of March next year in the worst of three scenarios, but the situation is much worse than that at the moment.
According to Eskom’s darkest picture, South Africans will only have full access to electricity on two out of every 10 days in this period, but they still seem to be underestimating the problems.
For May, Eskom predicted 22 days of load shedding, but there had already been 24 days of scheduled rolling blackouts by Friday.
Yes, in the worst-case scenario, load shedding is expected on 295 out of 365 days.
The above is grim and is made worse by the fact that Eskom hadn’t expected to go beyond stage two in April or stage three in May, yet both months have seen us hit stage four.
It’s all hands on deck at Eskom, with local and foreign experts set to jet in for a “crisis summit” on June 24 to try and figure out a way forward.
Winter is a grim time to lose power and it’s not going to get any better come September as we edge towards summer. Consider this, via MyBroadband:
From September, Eskom’s extreme scenario shows it will regularly have to implement stage 3 or stage 4 load-shedding, but that assumes unrealistic levels of diesel-burning at its open-cycle gas turbine stations.
That means that stage 5 and higher levels of load-shedding are increasingly looking like a reality between September 2022 and March 2023.
Stage five means that on average, over a four-day period, we can expect to be shed up to 12 times. Nine of those would be for two hours, and three of those would be for four hours. Over 96 hours, that’s 30 hours without power.
Economists and energy experts haven’t shied away from talk of stage eight, either. Both Mike Rossouw, an independent energy analyst, and professor Sampson Mamphweli, also an energy analyst, have stated it’s a possibility.
Stage eight means being hit with load shedding up to 12 times over a four-day period for four hours at a time. That’s a solid 12 hours a day.
Keep your friends close, and your power banks and chargers closer.
