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Ja, shame, South Africa is not in great shape right now.

The country has been battling load shedding as its been oscillating between stages 4, 5 and 6 over this festive season.

Tourists have begun using local expletives to match the frustration we have felt for ages now, even though yelling Eskom Se P**s doesn’t quite cut it anymore.

Eskom Se Push let us know that the electricity-(un)providers spared us all for Christmas – a blessed miracle, one for which we were all so so grateful – but hit back hard as the days turned into a new year.

As we get deeper into 2023, we’ll be wading in ever-darker waters with stage 7 load shedding – “or higher”- forecast for the middle of the year.

Just blerrie brilliant.

Intellidex analysts Peter Attard Montalto is the one saying we should expect load shedding to get worse in the new year, per BusinessTech, adding that it is the biggest risk, even more so than the looming global recession and other political issues.

He forecasts stage 7 load shedding for July, on average, while the peak may be higher, with stage 6 (average) in February.

Stage 6 load shedding was implemented this week (during the day, too, nogal) following a high number of breakdowns at Eskom’s stations.

Unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station – the most reliable in Eskom’s fleet, producing close to 1 000MW of power – will be offline until June 2023, at the very least.

Unit 2 is expected to go offline in October.

This is a major problem for the economy, although Attard Montalto said South Africa is remarkably resilient:

“The economic impact is less than what we would have said a year ago because there’s been so much adaptation,” he said.

“There has probably been about 1.2 gigawatts (1,200MW) of unregistered rooftop solar in South Africa in the last year, a large number of batteries, a huge amount of diesel and backup generation and batteries put in for business in the last year.

Granted, this just means the SA economy is “clinging on by its fingernails instead of getting anywhere positive in this environment”.

Attard Montalto also reckons that the impending global recession won’t affect us too much:

For South Africa, this won’t mean too much and will likely weather the recession “pretty well”, he said. Because of local issues with Transnet and ports and infrastructure, South Africa doesn’t take part in the global market commodity cycles – but it will benefit from a general boost in commodities.

The bigger worry, he reiterated, is gauging load shedding’s impact on our economy.

[source:businesstech]