WATT THE F#*K
A five-slide guide to why the lights are more on than off
Relief! Here’s how load shedding intensity has been reduced, plus five slides to make you smile ahead of the long weekend. Load shedding has been less intense than it has been in a very long time. This week, the grid has been at Stage 3 or Stage 4, and been suspended for short times. The slides show why.
The first slide shows that Eskom is doing less maintenance – a usual practice in winter. Demand is lower (probably because so many humans and businesses have left the grid). Private sector support teams are in place at power stations. And Eskom is going solar. This is a good-news slide.
The second slide shows that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to lift the energy cap on private generation is working. Look at the jump in energy projects this year. It’s an unstoppable energy revolution (other than, of course, the thorny issue of grid access). See next slide.
So, this year 1,300MW could come on to the grid and 3,081MW next year. In terms we will understand, that is four stages of load shedding. As I said last week, our hell has an end. The chart on the right shows grid capacity. The long journey now is how to wheel the new energy on to the grid.
This slide maps renewable projects. What I enjoyed seeing is that Eskom is working with the renewables sector. Great news.
This slide is technical, but its core meaning is that the death choke of bureaucracy is being loosened. Timeframes have been brought forward.
This is a clip from the business-government energy partnership. Businesses have sent engineers, project managers and other key skills to power stations that need them.
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summary:
The cadres are breaking a bit less.
The engineers are doing less planned service & maintenance.
The business sector has shrunk and needs less power from the grid.
If you have a business, sort yourself if you can at all. Your duty as an owner or director means if you can sort most of the problem inside your fence for less spend, you should. If it means you retract from three shift to two shift in order to survive, that is far more sensible than tagging your strategy to a poster that reads “THIS time the clowns will supply us with enough electricity”. It is 17 years since loadshedding started. This ship ain’t gonna turn in the next decade.