I learned yesterday that this is different from a state of emergency. Not that it matters in this case, because even the pandemic didn’t require a state of emergency (where civil liberties can be suspended).
The DA was publicly asking for the declaration of a state of disaster, and I was recoiling internally and wondering if they had totally lost it. When you do that, you remove heaps of parliamentary oversight. I can understand that sometimes you need to do that, for the sake of moving quickly, but as I also said yesterday: South Africans are fed up with the looting. They’d rather sit in the dark a little bit longer, because that’s what they’ll be doing anyway if this turns into another feeding frenzy. Which Sarel seems convinced is the only possible outcome. I dearly wish him to be wrong, not for his sake, but for ours!
So do I brother, never wished me wrong so badly in the past. My experience over many years on the inside, to use a phrase, eish… The confidence level is low.
Indeed it is!
It’s a pity that in our democracy (and the rest of Africa) political debate is carried on behind closed doors. This leaves us guessing as to what’s really going on even more than the transparent democracies that issue press releases etc.
We will also be following the route of our neighbours in the City of Cape Town to allow commercial and industrial generators to feed as much energy as they can back to the grid. We are tremendously happy that the 100MW limit has been lifted, allowing commercial and industrial generators with the freedom to generate as much electricity as they can.
Just caught a few tweets earlier, speaking at the Numsa congress today, it seams like the Numsa president slammed Cyril, the government and Eskom for all the talk of private this and private that, he basically said wanting to take any part of energy generation private is total BS.
Sadly by again being paid by you directly, with Tax monies or worse, by international loan from the IMF or Brics banks. Paid back by your Tax plus interest.
How many times in the new democrasy was Escam bailed out already….
Of course that is not surprising. Again, maybe I’m just weird in the sense that a lot of what I do relies on remembering stuff (of course that will come back to bite me one day), but I remember that back in the early 2000s, the Mbeki administration tried very hard to privatise the SEOs, and the reason they could never succeed was the unions.
When the latest shift towards private-sector involvement came along, I already knew the unions would be objecting. And let’s be honest, that is their job! You and I may not like it, but their job is to protect their members. Let me just add the disclaimer here, because I know someone else will, that I am fully aware that inside the unions there is also a lot of corruption going on, being a union boss is good business! But that doesn’t wipe from the table the simple fact that the purpose of a union is to represent the interests of the particular worker, and I think we all know that once we open the floodgates to private operators, it is a downhill slide for Eskom employees… at least in the short term!
The same is true even for Solidarity, which is always the “sore thumb” of unions, because they represent a rather unpopular bunch of people, proverbially speaking. But Solidarity, just like the other unions, is just doing it’s job. It represents the interests of its members, something said unpopular members are legally allowed to have.
I am reminded of a letter my grandfather wrote to the paper, many many years ago when people still did that, because they had no internet and all that. This letter was in response to another response, a bitter complaint about the backwardness of a certain (church) minister who wrote a letter to the paper about how people are not keeping the Sunday holy anymore. My grandfather asked: Did you not know that is his job?
I remember that to this day. You may not agree, but ask yourself that question every now and then. I may think the unions are messing things up – and I think that is an objective reality, even if that is a lone opinion – but I have to acknowledge the reality: That is their job. We should expect that kind of response.
In the end, this is going to come down to a simple question: How badly do you want that power? Are you sufficiently invested in your cause that you are willing to sit in the dark some hours of the day? For how long would you be willing to make that sacrifice?
While arguing with people on social media, you see the odd individual who would rather sit in the dark than allow a single person from Solidarity’s infamous list back into the power utility. I have mighty respect for these people. For sure, they are unwise and probably even a little racist, but at least they have the balls to stick with their convictions.
But from the view of those who despise “the west”, if I can say it like that, this might be like going to a loan shark. It may solve the immediate problem quickly, but it leaves you beholden to this person and/or group for a long time to come.
(I apologise… I do that thing where I ask myself if there is another way to look at this. If I was wearing the other guy’s boots, there certainly is).
Look what unions are doing to VW as an example, or to GM in the US, just listen to Biden speak. Nevermind what is happening locally.
Now that being said, the western way of thinking is capitalism and that is opposed to socialism. I need not remind anybody the diametrically opposed views here. In a capitalist value system, if you provide a service and the clients are happy, they pay you. Nobody apart from the unions are happy with Escam. Oh, unions are a socialist construct in SA, big bad capitalist exploiting workers. Therefore socialism good and capitalism bad.
With the non reliability of Escam, it’s an employment agency for CancER voters mostly as are most SoEs and government, and no reasonable and robust technical solutions on the horizon, it should rot. All the voters there should lose their employ and the union bosses their income. This is a parasitic relationship in unions in my view.
The issue at hand is ideology and the mediocrasy and political meddling. The Cosatu and CancER + sacp and the ideology and is what is eating the country. Look at all the S0Es, non functional.
One person explained it this way: No honest person can ever be trusted, nor a conscientious hard working one. Both those types of persons are problematic in the sense that the honest person are feared by the dishonest and the hard working one by the lazy. So use anything to hide that, racism is normally the easiest. Or supremacy or WMC or whatever is the latest catchphrase of the day.
As I have said before, a fish rots from the head… It holds for society and governments and businesses, just look at them pyramid schemes or Enron et…
I did not see the Unions coming out of the “closet”, so to speak, so soon after the severe LS woes as it directly affects their income in due course. So yeah, if Eskom, the ANC’s “Employment Agency” comes under threat, yeah, drama.
Also, I’m not up to date on Unions as there is not much reported on them generally, but I have picked up some “half smoked stompies” though like Irvin Jim from Numsa is having some serious issues to contend with recently.
It is also reported that Unions are losing members due to like LS and other economic woes, worse, for them, loss of “trust” in Unions.
On the political front, the ANC’s relationship with Unions and “staying in power”, is also taking severe strain lately.
True. But they need not be. In Japan, union’s are internal to the company, and membership is mandatory. When there is a dispute, the workers down tools and the union meets immediately. Sometimes the dispute is resolved within the same day. Strikes are typically organised so as to not disrupt production.
Even if we are discussing socialism on a philosophical level, it is not an all-or-nothing thing. In many western countries, healthcare is at least partially socialised, and it works well. In countries like America where it is completely capitalistic, an Epi-pen costs $600. In the UK it is 50GBP. I’ll pick the slightly-socialist version in this case, thanks.
Just to make my position clear, I am not in favour of the NHI in the current version of South Africa. It cannot work well because of the rampant corruption. The state-managed healthcare fund would be in the same state as the road accident fund. My point here is that it is not always the “socialist” part that is failing. Depending on the application, we sometimes pick an option that leans slightly more socialist.
(Even private Medical Aid funds are a little socialist. They are giant Stokvels, where everyone contributes, and there are rules saying who can withdraw from it).
Having storage without increasing production is like buying a piggy bank and then waiting to get rich. I can already hear the cries “the batteries are empty because the engineers designed them too big”.
We did the sums to use batteries at our factory for LS support and energy arbitrage. Payback was … uhm … never. So how will they make it work cost-effectively at utility scale? OK, I see my mistake, I’m looking at this logically.
I think a part of the utility scale batteries is also to avoid the need to ramp up and down on short notice which coal fired power stations can’t really do easily. When there’s extra generation available that goes into the battery while slowly lowering production to meet the demand and when peak time comes you use the battery while slowly ramping up to meet the demand.
Of course, like you said, if you are already struggling with normal daytime loads then the batteries will just sit there.
Hopefully the change with buying spare capacity from IPP’s (and the extras coming on over the years) will allow there to be some spare capacity to charge up the batteries.
This is of course assuming it’s managed correctly.
Actually not, you were looking at the ROI at a retail level. Utility scale is easy for ROI. We can use the Hornsdale plant in Aus as an example, from their website:
The Hornsdale Power Reserve is the world’s first big battery. It provides essential grid-support services.
The first 100MW/129MWh was completed in November 2017. In its first two years of operation the Hornsdale Power Reserve confirmed the benefits associated with grid-scale batteries in the National Electricity Market and saved South Australian consumers over $150 million.
Following this success, a 50MW/64.5MWh expansion was completed in September 2020. As part of the expansion the full 150MW is being upgraded to include Tesla’s Virtual Machine Mode, enabling the battery to provide inertia support services to the electricity grid.
I could not find the specific ROI, but in general, there is a good ROI for these systems at utility schale.
