No worries, I know what a fiend is, and I love what you’ve done with the name!
Yes, that was interesting. My guess is that the emotion around load shedding sells more clicks. The average person probably doesn’t care about the ghosts of Marx and Lenin, believing them to be completely harmless by now on account of having been dead long enough. Load shedding, on the other hand, has an impact on daily life.
Or maybe the guy writing the article is too young to know.
Small town/rural electricity fear? … here we have a good example if the impact a storm can have…12 days…
Yeah my inlaws in Prince Albert hasn’t had power for a few days now. The inverter system was really only sized for maybe 4 hours. They are going through the day fine, since there is plenty of sun, but around midnight the battery runs out. Telkom mobile remains online, MTN goes offline around 5PM every day… maybe the tech takes the generator home with him or something. Today the site hasn’t come online at all, maybe he has a day off.
At least the solar system keeps the freezer cold during the day.
And it has been HOT (very hot) up here in the EC. Hectic actually!
Mmmm … if I recall, during ADR’s term, he faced immense opposition on all levels, top to bottom with the criminal element all over everything.
Then the infamous “here, hold my beer, let me show you” interview.
After he left, with that glimpse into the dirty washing, Gov decided they needed to do “something”, like maybe “hold a bit all ye criminal networks, the trough is empty”, with “get onto some of that maintenance, will ya!” attitude.
I mean, it is an election year.
So we have before interview and after interview …
While this can certainly be construed as an indication that De Ruyter wasn’t the messiah some claimed him to be (which is probably not a common opinion on this forum), I think one always has to take into account how much momentum there is in the maintenance chain. Whatever planning you do now very often only comes into effect 18 to 24 months later. So I think it would be a mistake to attribute current successes to the successor, who isn’t even on board yet (still working his notice at Tongaat), or to the new board, which by all accounts has little to do with it.
There is also the simple matter of changing the culture. Maybe the man just managed to change a little bit of it, to get a few people to go: Hey, this actually works! And I feel good about my job again!
The question, for me, is always the long term outlook. The “fundamentals”. Will this last, without the right leadership? By all accounts, Dan Morokane looks like a qualified and principled individual, so there is at least hope of continued good leadership.
Very elegantly explained. Thanks. We see this a lot in politics, where new incumbents score brownie points early on, but it’s really because of things that their predecessor had set in motion. Or the reverse happens because their predecessor had fouled up so badly that, in fact, nobody could do anything about the mess anyway.
Lyndon Johnson once said that being in charge is often like being a jackass in a hail storm: “There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.”
for the peeps that have relatives etc. affected by this (non-edited info is sometimes hard to come by for the folks on the ground).
MEDIA BRIEFING: Update on Eskom power outage in Karoo towns. (Eskom specific feedback around the 10min mark).
Also interesting that there was something similar in Aus during January 2024 (if clicking on the video in that article, turn down volume - the accent, pitch and volume will melt your fillings!).
Definitely shows how vulnerable rural communities can be and how at least having something like a battery powered radio can be handy to be able to get updates.
figures don’t actually say too much - not as much as the headline wants to make out. Without knowing what maintenance means and without much more detailed information the “article” just manufactures controversy for clicks. As pointed out much of what looks positive now might be the result of things that happened under AdR and even before his time and after his time.
I think in the same breath I’ll just throw this picture from @Village_Idiot up again:
Now move the arrow one down to the unplanned outages which has since decreased almost proportionally to the planned outages (most likely due to previous years’ uptake in maintenance).
I would assume it means the opportunity to do more maintenance. Of course I get it requires planning months in advance, but with how tight things were running I don’t think it’s impossible that some plants had parts ready and waiting, but they just couldn’t afford the downtime.
Would actually also be nice to see a consumption comparison as I believe the solar VAT rebate would also have made a dent in consumption. Heck I even know that up North it wasn’t as warm in January which most likely also brought consumption down.
TLDR: Many ways to skin a cat. Is there more maintenance being done, absolutely, but there’s a lot more factors to consider and I, personally, feel that it’s just a case of “it is now possible” and not a case of “we weren’t doing enough”.
News reports today mention several arrests that have been made RE corrupt goings on inside or involving Eskom. Looking at the dates it seems likely that most of these investigations were initiated when de Ruyter was at the helm. Of course Eskom can’t arrest, the Hawks do that, but Eskom would have had to co-operate with forensic auditors within the Hawks.
I wonder who is going to claim the credit?
President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver the State of the Nation Address (SoNA) on Thursday, 8 February 2024 at 7pm.
Sooo, see we are suddenly Stage 4 after the SONA … 
Oh I can just imagine the conspiracy theories people dream up over that. I mean, in this nation where a sizeable proportion is angry at the other half if the power was on for a Rugby match and then down for a Soccer match… and vice versa.
No conspiracy theory, just an interesting observation.
“Feels like” a pattern. These jokers brag about how “sorted” it is, and Eskom goes and switches off the next day …
How’s the weather where you live? Joburg had overcast weather most of the day today. I should know. We had a 2am load shed, power never came back, grey morning skies, and my battery is low from running the house over night. The nightmare combination I’ve theorized about came to pass. Anyway, we managed to nurse the battery until 12:30 when the juice came back.
Point is, there’s a lot of rooftop solar now, reportedly mostly in Gauteng and WC, and the pattern I think I see is that bad weather means solar taking less load off the grid and so load shedding shifts a couple of stages. Storms affect other things too. I think the weather is a driver for load shedding.
Stage 6 hit last night at 12am … we’ve had many Fridays over the last X months with no Stage 6…
It is not good.
My personal view:
The problem I’m seeing, no matter how much maintenance Eskom is doing, it cannot sort the base load reliability, nor improve on it, with the aged generation units … they are going to break down, and it will get worse over time.
Last night, weekend, midnight, we hit stage 6.
There will be good reasons for it, some will come past and tell us why … the fact is, we are so far behind with keeping what is in tip-top condition, as it is supposed to be kept in. Today, that is impossible to achieve.
Renewables can help a dang lot, the problem is, where it must be installed for optimum benefits, to handle weather better, as one example, there is no transmission capacity left on the lines.
Now everything can be fixed … but SA is out of money …
But when we go into Stage 6 at midnight on a Friday evening … that is not good.
A recent statement from Eskom said that they are seeing a change in the shape of the curve. They were talking about demand, and they said that now the morning and evening peaks are much higher and sharper relative to daytime demand.
So I guess that here what would be a duck curve in, say, Australia just fills the gap a bit, because our grid cannot satisfy demand anyway.
I also wonder how many folks are selling back. Certainly in Johannesburg the resellers tariff is not attractive. Factor in the cost of a bidirectional meter (hint: it is not City Power that pays for that meter) and the requirement to be a nett purchaser, and it is hard to see how one will not be out of pocket.
A number of the offline plant is boiler steam tube leakage. Shutdown and cooldown time involved. finding them pipes, repairing them, testing and signoff. Then heating back up. We hope for no rework…
The issue is two fold from what I was told: The water for steam has a very narrow and tight tolerance for all sorts of things, hardness, PH, mineral content, contaminants and debris. These things corrode those pipes inside out. There are Labs on site to test and monitor. For a number of years already, the thing is no supply or at least frequent shortages of staff and supplies to do those tests.
The story being the tolerances are relaxed, so we can only speculate as to what that may mean. Downtime me thinks is the measure of what it means. Frequently, as was widely reported by the msm, the alarms are disabled so nobody know what the tolerances are…
ChemieseGroetnis
