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EskomSePush had a busy weekend as South Africa flipped from one stage of load shedding to another.

Yesterday evening, we were told to prepare for a week of stage four across the county, with a switch to stage five at night. That means the odd four-and-a-half-hour block with no power.

The situation is so dire that Eskom admitted it has run out of cash to buy diesel and didn’t plan to order any more until April next year.

News24 pulled no punches when it said this will lead to “extreme levels of load shedding not yet experienced” in South Africa:

At a state of the system briefing last week, Eskom Chief Operating Officer Jan Oberholzer said that since 1 April, Eskom has spent R12 billion on diesel against an initial budget of R6.1 billion. This was later revised to R11.1 billion.

“If we continue to burn diesel the way we have for the past seven months, the cost would be astronomical. But we do not have the cash to spend. We would be able to pay if the municipalities were paying us,” said Oberholzer at the time.

The implications of Oberholzer’s statement are beginning to sink in as SA starts the week on Stage 4 load shedding.

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan was very forthright in his assessment yesterday, admitting there are “serious concerns about the risk of higher levels load shedding in the coming months”.

Higher than what? We live on stages two, three, and four now so we must be talking about stages five and up becoming the norm.

There’s some respite for those of us in Cape Town. For the rest of the country, it’s just a giant middle finger:

At the briefing last week, Eskom provided a statistical forecast of load shedding over the next 10 months. The forecast showed that until August 2023, SA would experience Stage 3 load shedding on most days of the month, provided that diesel was burned to make up for the shortfall. The diesel required to keep the system at Stage 3 varied from R3 billion to more than R7 billion a month. As burning this amount of diesel is physically and logistically impossible, the implication was that load shedding would in fact, be several stages above Stage 4.

Oh, several stages.

Do yourself a favour and take a look at what stage six looks like in your area. I’d be without power for just shy of 10 hours today and 11-and-a-half tomorrow.

Via Moneyweb, the hunt for the dough required to stave off such a disaster continues:

“The DPE is urgently working with National Treasury and Eskom for it to find the money to buy supplies of diesel,” the department said. The government is also “looking for savings” within Eskom’s existing funds for the money as one potential solution, it said.

Have they tried looking under President Ramaphosa’s couch cushions at Phala Phala?

Charge your devices whenever possible. Buy that UPS device you’ve been putting off buying. Crunch the numbers again to see if going solar is worth it.

We’re in for the long haul and things are about to get extreme.

[sources:news24&moneyweb]