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Ja, no, look – you’re tired of load shedding, and I’m tired of writing about it.

Yesterday morning, we covered how the power utility had said there was a “high probability” that load shedding stages would be escalated “at short notice”.

Come 2:30PM, and bang, hello stage four, causing South Africans to frantically open EskomSePush to check when the darkness would set in.

That escalation, says Eskom, was due to the cold weather, persistent generation constraints caused by multiple unit breakdowns, and our obsession with being able to turn a light on here and there, or warm our homes, or cook a meal.

How dare we?

Anyway, by this stage you know that load shedding is here to stay, for at least five years, according to energy expert Ted Blom.

According to Eskom, which submitted its long-term forecasts to the Standing Committee on Appropriations (SCOA) yesterday, stage three power outages “will be required every month until March 2022”, if the power shortfall hits 13 000MW.

It added that outages would definitely continue until December of this year, before resuming in January through to March next year, and then starting again from June.

This from the Daily Maverick:

“It is important to recognise that due to the current unreliability and unpredictability of the system, the risk for load shedding remains. This will be the reality until after the 18 months of reliability maintenance (Eskom’s emphasis),” the power utility’s presentation reminded MPs twice over six pages of mostly diagrams…

The power utility is R488-billion in debt as at 31 March 2020, in a continuation of what has led Eskom to be described as the biggest risk to the economy and public finances.

Eskom is broken, and broke.

Meanwhile, it’s sending out tweets with helpful info like this:

Remember to dress as though you’re visiting the South Pole whilst inside your own home, because the state looted and plundered all of the resources it should have used to maintain the power supply.

I don’t have the energy to go into greater detail, and the Daily Maverick has done the hard yards, so they deserve your clicks.

Read that article in full here.

Suffice to say, we really are in this for the long haul, and it may be time to seriously consider looking into a generator, especially for those who work from home.

[source:dailymaverick]