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Gamers will be familiar with the title of this piece, however the monsters and challenges they face in this game pale into insignificance when compared to the challenges, we, as a nation, face.
Once our illustrious National government realized the impact this folly (which they were forewarned about in 2003) would have on our country and its long term economic future, it was too late. Mines, manufacturers, resource processing plants and many other manner of high-volume electricity users had throttled back and in some cases, shut-down plants and have sought greener pastures.
Earlier in May 2016, our illustrious Number One, expressed his “happiness and excitement” for the achievement of the end of load-shedding in South Africa on a recent visit to Megawatt Park, Sunninghill. He proudly announced that Eskom was in fact so overstocked with electrons that they were now in a position to export to our neighbours. He also mentioned how happy the Eskom employees were, which is little wonder when the average annual salary at Eskom is R630,000 or R52,500 per month. I am fairly sure that the labour force out at the various power stations are not earning anywhere near that, which means Megawatt Park employees are, in fact, smiling all the way to the bank and not because of the end of load-shedding.
Although Eskom would like to attribute the absence of load-shedding as an achievement of their turnaround plan, the majority of this “success” is due to a massive drop in demand. It is estimated that approximately 10% of the total demand was wiped-out between 2013 and 2015. Luckily for Eskom, because their electricity production capacity also dropped from 37,745MW to 34,345 MW. In effect, Eskom have been successful in avoiding declaring the reality of the dire circumstances through:
1) Load-shedding – A schedule of planned and communicated electricity outages to reduce the load on the overburdened grid.
2) Price increases- The price of electricity has more than doubled from 2008 to 2015 from 19c/kWh to 48c/kWh.
Large customers have gone elsewhere, South Africa’s economy is in its worst condition in decades and Pretoria are patting themselves on the back for ending load-shedding. Sadly, whilst load-shedding may be dead and gone AS A POLICY, I don’t believe that unscheduled power cuts can ever be declared impossible. In my view this is political rhetoric merely playing with the semantics of “load shedding” as a political tactic.
Suffice to say that in the Johannesburg region, we currently experience 11 power outages (NB. Not load-shedding, hahahaha) per day. Admittedly, some of these involve only one or two streets, however some are quite widespread as we have seen recently, where a vast area of Johannesburg experienced long periods (in excess of 5 hours) without power. One area in Bryanston was without power for two days due to a transformer failure, no doubt it failed as a result of inadequate maintenance.
In effect, we as the consumer have gone backwards as a at least with load-shedding, you would be advised in advance and the outage period would be more or less in line with the prediction. Now, the outages are as and when something fails or the utility decides to summarily cut the power. Any attempt to establish the duration and cause of the outage from your friendly call centre will be met with routine vagueness.
It is inevitable for any power utility across the globe to have a maintenance backlog, usually due to budgetary and human resource constraints. In 2008 the backlog expressed in monetary terms was R27,4 Billion and has grown to a whopping R68 Billion in 2016. This, in a utility that is in fact producing less electricity than in 2008 down by approximately 9% in 2016 and the price per kWh up by a staggering 152%.
Call it power outages, load shedding or whatever you will, the nett effect is a loss of 1,4% of GDP per MONTH. Our government once again insults the intelligence of the entire nation
