I hope this isn’t a once-off, just because Patrice has political connections.
Just think of the advantages that can be had by allowing wheeling.
A mine could set up a 100MW solar farm elsewhere and potentially sell power to itself. If this practice was widely available I think private interests would get on board very quickly.
It is said solar can’t replace coal due to generation unpredictability.
While that is strictly true, we are load-shedding 2000 - 4000MW on sunny days.
So we don’t replace we supplement.
If there is sun we don’t load - shed, don’t use diesel and pump water up the hill.
If there is no sun, we still have better reserves to offset load-shedding.
Worst case scenario, we still load-shed as we do now. It doesn’t make matters worse than the status quo.
So is this something you can use to predict load-shedding by monitoring the grid’s frequency on your inverter? I know in some of the other threads (might have been MyBB) there were discussions around this…
Would a black start really be as bad a what the press says? Lebanon had a total grid outage (ran out of fuel) and they managed to restart their plants in a day. Sure, they are also on intensive load-shedding now but they were also load shedding prior to the outage.
While the generators might out of sync and trip, it doesn’t mean that the furnaces are instantly cold and need a week to warm up.
That being said, I know very little about how power stations work on the finer level.
@TheTerribleTriplet I still don’t see the signs - I’ve only had my grid frequency drop below 50hz a couple of times in the last few days and then it was 49.98 or so.
They lost generators yesterday, and load-shedding only kicks in today. This leads me to believe that:
There is spare capacity. They can run the peaking plants to make up the shortfall.
That’s probably what they’ve been doing yesterday.
If some other capacity could be returned to the grid in time, no load-shedding would be necessary.
… but that could not be done.
Management (aka de Ruyter) refuses to exceed the allocated Diesel budget to bridge this with the peaking plants.
Hence load-shedding kicks in until capacity is returned to the grid, or as budget is available to run peaking plants.
I don’t know how accurate point 5 is, but that’s my current theory. There is a change in culture going on, and that may well have something to do with the culture of the man leading the place. The new culture is: Don’t spend money you don’t have.
That also explains why the disagreement as to whether the new boss is doing his job is divided on what one might call cultural lines. If it is a decision between eating this month or having lights in 3 years… I’d rather get someone in who is willing to burn more Diesel right now!
Right, which is why I say the inherent culture of management (which includes things related to how I deal with credit, debt, etc) is a big and often ignored factor.
Previous CEOs would do anything to keep the lights on, including making more debt. Live to fight another day, the debt is someone else’s problem.
This one apparently will do anything to get out of the debt hole, including higher levels of load shedding.
At least one guy wrote an opinion piece in a local newspaper complaining that he’s putting too much focus on the repayment of debt, while the poor and the indigent have to do without electricity (despite being promised free electricity in earlier election campaigns). All I can say is: You honour your commitments, even if they were made by a predecessor, and not under the best of terms.
Too early to say though if the reduction of debt was just due to short term changes. IE selling of inventory. I’ve worked with many corporates who would institute changes to benefit one part of the business where those same changes harm it in 10 other places. The reason being, their bonus is based on the performance of the one sector which they propped up.
It is a playbook I have seen before:
A new guy comes in slashes the maintenance budget, and so looks better than his predecessor on the balance sheet. The plant runs fine during his tenure.
But, the plant runs fine based on previously done maintenance by his predecessor.
As things start to fall apart, he moves on.
The guy who comes afterwards inherits an unmaintained plant and has to spend a fortune on catch up maintenance. His plant suffers numerous breakdowns and performs badly.
It was all brought on by boy wonder’s irresponsibility. But boy wonder stats still make him look like boy wonder.
The public would do well to keep that in mind when assessing past ESKOM CEO performances.
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