Life in a world without load shedding

General Discussions
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How I miss the old days. Now I’m even more of a villain when I complain about electricity being used like there’s no end to it. Before we would look at the battery, check the weather forecast and then plan. Now it just all gets turned on.

I had a moment of schadenfreude earlier today when I had to point out that they had so many appliances running simultaneously that a cup of tea would be a load too far. (I didn’t mention using the gas stove. Folks don’t even think about their options any more).

Honestly, it’s like a switch has been thrown inside Heads. It’s not just full steam ahead and to hell with the icebergs as regards the electricity, the amount of packaging, especially plastic is up.

I argue that I’m not just being a kill joy. Prudence got us through 5 years of load shedding & more recently water outages. But that’s all over, right?

No. The City continues to warn about possible increases in water restrictions. As it is we have rotating throttling of reservoirs. There have been three multi-hour electricity outages in our suburb in the last week, today’s a block away from us. City Power are running high voltages out of their substations to try to keep current down on old infrastructure. That infrastructure is under strain because of illegal connections. Rand Water have told all municipalities in Gauteng to reduce usage because they are going to systematically reduce the supply to each city because the current demand from the Vaal River system is not sustainable.

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This reminds me, allow me some authors freedom …

2008 Cpt has LS, the country laughed. Year later, it hits Jhb, and SA is introduced to LS.

Few years back #DayZero hits Cpt. A 12st century city running out of water is blasted out internationally. Then water shortages hit Jhb …

Ps. CoCT pulled together like champs to reduce water usage.

Maybe watch Cpt … if drama happens here, it is coming to a city near you. :rofl:

Because I installed solar for ROI back in ±2012, the first systempies - how to recharge 2 x 100ah deepcycle batteries using solar panels, forced to register in 2019 so went grid-tied, LS mitigation was always but a side benefit, the ROI today still very much center focus.

Just a challenge with 10 people at times …

It is all in the mindset.

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Read this this morning …

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Yes you did. And anecdotal evidence I have is that y’all still are mindful of water useage.

A difference is that COCTs shortages were down to natural causes, COJ has a murky mix of causes - though it’s clear that our per person per day figures are too high.

How much of an incentive did punitive tariffs in COCT provide?

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I believe Johannesburg can be turned around. But it won’t be quick. So Morero gets some points for saying that there is no instant fix.

This morning I made a vow: Anybody or any party talking about quick fixes is not going to get my vote. I understand that telling people that the road ahead will get bumpy before it gets smooth again is not what people want to hear, but it is a necessary truth. Also if you tell that truth up front, you won’t get the kind of backlash that the recently elected British government is getting.

Residents need to get involved too. Round where I live we get told that we pay all the rates and taxes, but Bosmont (poor, mostly coloured community in the South, lots of grant recipients, high unemployment) gets all the benefits.

But last year I went along to one of the compulsory public participation sessions that the municipality is mandated to hold before a budget can be approved. And I saw why Bosmont get at least some of what they want.

Representatives, or individual residents, are given a chance to speak. The wards are called out by ward number. The wards in my area had no organised representation and, in most cases, nobody saying anything at all.

Bosmont, by contrast, had gone through every page of the budget. Had ideas about how money allocated to X could be better spent on Y. Their RA sent their best speakers to address each of their concerns. They knew every member of the executive comittee - name and portfolio.

I asked them for help because I’d never done this before. They first asked where I was from. I told them ward 99. They said 99! Nobody from 99 ever attends!

Anyways, their chairman asks what I plan to talk about. I tell him. He then points out to me the relevant member of the executive and tells me to look at that guy the whole time I’m speaking.

They know how to play the game, and they play it. If it’s true that they get allocation whilst where I live we get nothing, I can tell folks exactly why that is.

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6

Our household, and all our friends, we did not care about “punitive tariffs”.

We all understood that it is necessary for the City to have the funds to address the problem going forward.

And yes, because water got expensive, we are most definitely more mindful of wastage.

So from perceived “punitive” to “this City Works” as seen by the immense maintenance they have been doing for a few years now on the water infrastructure.

Infrastructure does not last indefinitely.
Each generation, as my retired engineer FIL said, must pay their own way.
That incudes roads, bridges, dams btw.

CoJHB, they cocked it up with politics, greed and political control at all cost.

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During the drought, the tariffs were adjusted to punish high use. For people in the 10kl to 30kl bracket, which would be most middle class houses, the price was R120/m^3! That came down to about R52/m^3 in December 2018 when the worst was over.

High use, over 35m^3 a month, was R1000 per m^3 at the time.

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8

This got me thinking as to how large the collection dams there are for CoCT.
And there was also a desalination plant built in Koeberg. What became of that?
I understand Perth has plenty of these plants…

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I don’t know about specific plants. What I do know is that at the time CoCT put the desalination plants on the back burner and instead sunk a couple boreholes. I also seem to remember that this upset some people, who invested a lot into pitching a desalination solution to the city. The City said, at the time, that for the money that they can spend and the time constraints, drilling boreholes were the better option. They were probably right.

CoCT does however run a couple of desalination plants, or pay people to do it. A while ago the one at the V&A Waterfront run by QFS systems ran into legal issues, because the water is more polluted by the Green Point sewage outlet than the tender stated. There is also an ongoing feasibility study to put another plant at Paarden Eiland. At 22 000 m^3 per day, that’s about 2.4% of the city’s daily use.

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Don’t these desalination plants need plenty of power (why Koeberg got cited?)

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It’s essentially a waste water plant (same filters, ponds, floculant, etc) followed by an industrial sized reverse osmosis setup. Nothing inherently requires more power than a waste water plant.

In fact, little side story, reclaiming water from waste water is actually easier than desalination. Because it is mostly the same process, but waste water is already a lot less salty. Grin.

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They’re also a problem for marine life/vegetation, because if you extract desalinated water from the plant, you are increasing salt levels in the seawater around and downstream from the plant. That doesn’t mean it CAN’T be done, but in COCT they have things like functioning civil society and so there is more red tape.

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Which of course begs the question of how much water they are using from these waste water plants or is it flowing out to sea??

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Serendipitously I caught a conversation about desalination on YouTube last night.

There is not one process. Some plants are doing the desalination in the water, in which case the increased salinity problem can occur.

In Saudi Arabia they are doing lots of desalination, and the way they do it the salt water is pumped to an on-line station, and the highly salty “waste” is directed to pans where it dries, thus leaving salt that can be sold.

OK… they have probably perfect conditions for that to be done, and they are not worried about budget.

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15

You can of course also solve the problem by using larger volumes of sea water, and dumping some of it back into the sea without extracting water, using it only to dilute the salt you need to send back. Of course that impacts efficiency and therefore energy use.

You can also dump the salt over a larger area, but of course that increases the cost of the plant.

Always with the compromises in engineering… but the solutions exist :slight_smile:

I actually don’t know. In Cape Town I suspect most waste water plants essentially make the water clean enough that it can be dumped in the sea, and then dumps it in the mentioned body of water. In Windhoek (where I grew up), waste water reclamation has been done since 1968 (formerly called Goreangab waste water plant). But then, no real ocean nearby… and water has been a scarce commodity forever.

Edit: Something about the mentioned waste water plant. There is a dam in the same area, Goreangab dam, which captures the output of the Arebbusch river. This dam tends to be somewhat polluted though… to put it mildly. When growing up, we were always told that whether you clean the waste water, or the water from Goreangab dam, is essentially the same thing :slight_smile: