[imagesource: Armand Hough / African News Agency]

On September 8, Eskom implemented load shedding and we’ve been riding that wave ever since.

If you’re a fan of unwanted records, you can jot this run down as our longest load shedding streak to date.

The rest of the country is grappling with stage three today, whereas Cape Town is a mix of stages one and two throughout the day until a 10PM switch to stage three.

We can thank the generation of additional capacity using the City of Cape Town’s Steenbras Pumped Storage Plant for that.

The City is not content with that plan alone, and BusinessTech now reports that it has issued a new tender to establish ‘third party aggregators’:

[This would] reward residents and businesses who allow their power to be turned off voluntarily to reduce consumption.

The system will see customers being rewarded for voluntarily reducing their power usage at certain times when the city’s power generation is constrained.

Using this system, the city would ask for a reduction in usage to try and prevent a blackout for people who rely on its power.

If you signed up for the proposed system, your power would be switched off during certain times and you would be rewarded.

It’s unclear what that reward would be at this stage. I’d like all my traffic fines vacated, please.

My WiFi stays on during load shedding, my laptop is charged up, and I’m good to go. If this eventually helps reduce the stages of load shedding across the city, I could be on board with this.

Mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, said the ‘Power Heroes’ (as he’s dubbed them) could do just that.

According to the city, when usage needs to be cut, the aggregators would switch off agreed-to non-essential electrical equipment that certain Capetonians said they could – this could be done remotely via installed smart devices.

Add up all those smaller savings and you eventually end up with a sizeable reduction in power consumption.

In addition to the above proposal, there are plans to build a solar power plant in Atlantis and procure an additional 200MW from Independent Power Producers.

In a separate article, BusinessTech outlined just how bad 2022 has been when compared to previous years:

Data from South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) showed that Eskom had cut 2,276GWh of electricity in the first six months of 2022 – more than 90% of the 2,521GWh it shed for the entire 2021.

The situation is even worse when laid out in tabular form, with data taken from EskomSePush:

Image: BusinessTech

Eskom stated we will be on stage three until at least Thursday due to persistently high levels of breakdowns, as well as problems bringing back online two generating units at the Kendal power station.

Clearly, we cannot rely on the power utility to turn around their ship in the near future so any and all options should be on the table.

[sources:bustech&bustech]