As of Thursday at midnight (or Thursday night at 11:59PM, to clear up any confusion), South Africa will go into a 21-day lockdown.

Sure, that’s far from ideal, but if we want to prevent an untold number of deaths down the line, now is the time to act.

With everyone focuses on news related to the coronavirus, or COVID-19, Eskom’s load shedding woes have been relegated to back page news.

If we’re locked inside our homes, and load shedding strikes, though, expect all hell to break loose.

According to BusinessTech, “government is working with the entire energy sector to ensure that South Africa does not face power shortages and load shedding during the coronavirus lockdown”.

Department of Trade and Industry minister Ebrahim Patel stressed that energy to essential services would go uninterrupted, and that Eskom was expecting a reduced demand for electricity during the lockdown period.

Sadly, there are no guarantees:

Eskom has indicated that it does not expect load shedding this week but warned that there is a possibility it will be implemented…

The power utility, meanwhile, has offered to buy surplus electricity from existing generating plants, an indication it thinks it will continue to struggle to meet demand on its own in the short term, according to Reuters…

Eskom has previously procured power from companies during times of crisis.

Moneyweb reports that Sasol is bidding to supply Eskom with temporary supplies of power.

An Eskom tweet from Tuesday, March 24, outlined that load shedding could still be implemented in the coming days and weeks,

Then, earlier this morning, Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha spoke on eNCA about how the company “cannot guarantee that there will be no load shedding during the lockdown”.

Below from TimesLIVE:

…Mantshantsha said during the past two weeks the utility had managed to bring down unplanned outages or breakdowns to an average of 11,000 megawatts.

“When the big users of electricity knock off or send their workers home, there should be a drop in demand, so during the lockdown, we do not expect to have load-shedding. We hope to continue as we have been doing at the moment.”

However, he said Eskom plants remained unreliable and vulnerable. This would not change in the next three weeks, he said.

A month ago, energy experts told us we would be lucky if load shedding lasted 18 months, saying that at least five years was a more realistic timeline.

Clearly, we’re in this for the long haul.

Back to Mantshantsha:

“The reality is that we are working with old systems that cannot be relied upon.

“No-one can give you a guarantee that you will not see load-shedding,” Mantshantsha said.

The electricity utility is reminding people to switch off unnecessary lights, appliances and plug points before going to bed.

There seems to be a great spirit of ubuntu amongst many South Africans in these trying times, so I guess we should also try our utmost to help out our flailing power utility in the hopes that our lockdown isn’t plunged into darkness.

If turning off a few appliances and plug points before bed means a reduced chance of load shedding, let’s give it a shot.

[sources:businesstech&timeslive]