Last week was a rough one for Eskom (and by extension, us). It faced delays to scheduled repairs, battled without diesel and had to put up with some hectic weather. All this was to keep the country from entering the clutches of stage 7, which it successfully managed to pull off against all odds.
Or did it?
According to economists at the Bureau for Economic Research (BER), the country “technically” already entered stage 7 load shedding. “At a point last week, Eskom was technically ‘shedding’ at stage 7, spread between rolling blackouts and load curtailment on heavy industrial users,” the economists said.
If you aren’t aware, load curtailing is when Eskom asks some of its more power-hungry users –such as mines and factories – to lower their own power consumption by around 20% during periods of low energy.
If this were true, the country wasn’t in stage 7 for particularly long. Eskom sprung the stage 6 schedules on to us on Thursday last week, with the utility managing to reduce that to stage 5 over the weekend. Originally, Eskom wanted the country back on stage 2 by this morning, Monday, 12 December. Obviously, that never happened – with stage 5 sticking around “until further notice.”
If you head over to your area’s schedule, you’ll notice that the difference between stages 6 and 7 is minimal – only two hours to be exact. Sometimes Eskom oversteps the bounds of its own schedules, throwing people further into darkness when the lights are meant to be on. Most of us have already experienced stage 7 at some point or another.
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Goodbye Unit 1
The possibility of truly experiencing stage 7 load shedding hasn’t gone away either. Yes, we’re on stage 5 for the foreseeable future. But Eskom’s problems are desperate – with no light at the end of the tunnel. The company is without any diesel, having already spent all its budget for the year on refilling its diesel stocks.
Another problem Eskom is facing is the loss of Unit 1 at the Koeberg power station. Unit 1 usually provides around 1,000MW of power to the grid, though the country will be without its power for the next six months due to scheduled maintenance. Once Unit 1 has made its return, Unit 2 next door will undergo its own maintenance, perpetuating the cycle.
Source: Bureau for Economic Research
