[imagesource: Creamer Media]

There’s nothing quite like an EskomSePush notification to remind you that all is not well with this country.

When you start being thankful that you’ll only be without power for two and a half hours, you know you’ve come to accept your fate.

Businesses suffer (even Woolies, gasp), we all roll our eyes, Eskom plans to hike tariffs, and the show goes on.

CEO Andre de Ruyter has the unenviable task of trying to steer Eskom clear of a total meltdown, and during a media briefing this morning, he had some sombre words for South Africans hoping for a short-term solution.

It’s a good thing he has grey hair already.

This via MyBroadband:

De Ruyter said that instead of continuing to defer maintenance, Eskom is now actively working on maintaining its power stations.

Conducting scheduled maintenance on these generation units will, unfortunately, result in more load-shedding going forward, he said.

“We intend to return to the cycle of maintaining our plant as per the equipment manufacturer’s guidelines,” De Ruyter said.

“In the past, we neglected to perform scheduled maintenance as required, and those legacies are coming home and are causing us to have unreliable equipment.”

“This will cause us to have an increased probability of load-shedding over the medium-term as we fix the system,” he added.

In summary, load shedding is here to stay.

Energy expert Chris Yelland shared a graph on Twitter this morning that features far too much yellow and red for my liking:

Words like ‘bleak’, ’emergency generation reserves’ and ‘high cost’ usually spell disaster.

Much has been said and written about how we arrived at this point, but let’s focus on the woeful (and criminal) lack of maintenance over the years:

The power utility’s EAF [ energy availability factor] dropped from above 90% in the mid-1990s to below 65% in 2019. This decline was mostly attributed to a lack of maintenance and the effect of breakdowns at ageing power stations.

“We ran a coal fleet like a series of kombi taxis, but we reached a high EAF,” [retired Eskom chief nuclear officer Dave Nicholls] said.

Eskom sends out emergency generation orders when the grid is in danger of being overloaded, and these have significantly increased in frequency over the years, further reducing the ability to conduct maintenance.

These orders require power plants to continue functioning no matter what to prevent a power generation crisis.

“By the time we reached 2007, we had an emergency generation order every working day,” he said.

It’s fair to say we’re now paying for the sins of Eskom’s corrupt leadership, which stacked up year on year.

For a look at Eskom’s plans for 2020, check out this tweet from its official account. A great deal of info has been shared on that thread, but here’s the overview:

I hope you do regret the inconvenience you’ve caused, Eskom.

Given that the system “will be vulnerable” for approximately 18 months (or far, far longer), it might be worth looking at ways to get off the grid and dodge load shedding.

This MyBroadband article provides a good overview of the options.

Thoughts and prayers to us all during these trying times.

[source:mybroadband]