[imagesource: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg]

As I write this, there is no load shedding scheduled for the day, although that is subject to change at the drop of a hat.

Or, to put it more accurately using Eskom speak, when the next “partial load loss” occurs.

For the benefit of everybody who has grown tired of seeing people on Facebook asking when they will be load shed, please tell your loved ones to download EskomSePush.

We don’t have any connection with the app, we’re all just tired of Karen asking if her power is dropping tonight.

So, about the most terrifying part of our recent load shedding, then. This from The Sunday Times, which states that “the disarray at Eskom’s power stations is so far gone that it seems to be a miracle SA has any electricity at all”:

On Wednesday night this week only one of Eskom’s 17 power stations was operating at full capacity. That’s not even the scariest part.

That power station, Komati, is 60 years old and produces only 1% of SA’s electricity needs. Located between Bethal and Middelburg in Mpumalanga, it generates a mere 115MW for the grid…

This was the horror situation as the country slid into the grip of winter and, with it, the ninth day of stage 2 load-shedding since the start of the new financial year in April.

Years of gross and corrupt mismanagement, and you’re left with one out of 17 power stations operating at full capacity.

That is genuinely frightening.

Senior managers looted hundreds of millions during the building of Kusile, which was used to buy cars, palatial homes, and other luxuries, with some money even ending up in the coffers of a foundation started by one of Jacob Zuma’s fiancées.

Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has apologised to South Africans and pleaded for more time to turn things around, pointing out that long-term maintenance means short-term sacrifice.

He said:

“In addition to that, we need to acknowledge that our plants are old. They have not been well looked after. Our plants, when we exclude Medupi and Kusile … have an average age of in excess of 40 years, and it’s been a hard 40 years…

“So it’s a bit like a car that you haven’t maintained properly, that you’ve revved in the red on a continuous basis. And now that it’s breaking down, you really have to do a lot of work in order to catch up,” De Ruyter said.

…“[We] are pushing the organisation as hard as we can. People are working extraordinary hours to bring units back. But we simply cannot perform miracles overnight,” he said.

De Ruyter has only been at the helm since January last year, so he is perhaps deserving of the time he asks for, but patience really is wearing thin.

There are now teenagers, no doubt up to no good on TikTok, who have never known a country without load shedding.

Energy expert Chris Yelland spoke recently about ‘Code Red’ at Eskom, and BusinessTech reports that we could be in for some short-term carnage:

[Yelland said] that Eskom’s plan to decommission six units at coal-powered plants in the coming months could potentially push load shedding to stage 4 or stage 5.

The country’s power stations have already experienced more unplanned downtime in 2021 – averaging 24.3% of the fleet offline, versus 20.9% in 2020…

Yellend previously calculated that the South African economy effectively loses out on R1 billion worth of productivity per stage of load shedding, per day – at stage 4, that would be R4 billion lost every day.

I just checked what stage 4 would entail today in Gardens, Cape Town, and we would be looking at seven-and-a-half hours of load shedding.

Stage 3 would be five hours.

We haven’t hit those desperate depths in a while, but as they say in the classics, ‘winter is coming’.

Otherwise, chin up and let’s have ourselves a great week, eh?

[sources:sundaytimes&bustech]