I heard some official say that we wont have a national power blackout next year. Oooh, so guess whats coming. Basically, load shedding means that a fleet of contractors drive around and power municipal blocks on and off. The problem is, that, if they dont do this in time if another catastrophe hits Eskom, the national grid will fail, and starting up the national grid can take around 2 months according to some Eskom veteran who gave a talk that I attended. Well, if that were true, then wed be dangerously close to the edge of chaos... but considering that globally, most large outages, some larger than all of our generating capacity, were all resolved in under 3 days, I dont really see us having to deal with an outage longer than a few days. Eskom is the only utlity in the world that sells less electricity today than it did 5 years ago. It has been adding capacity, but only enough to make up for the decline in efficiency of its existing capacity. The silver lining to all of this? Less money spent on telecommunications. More time to braai. South Africa will probably have more decentralized power in a few years time and could potentially benefit more from novel power generation technologies as they become available.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 10:24:44 +0000
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