Tag: loadshedding

Not a great day

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It’s hard not to be a bit down when you wake up to wind, rain, poor service and no electricity. And then the bad news is compounded by the first two things served to you on social media. All a bit much for a Monday morning.

Still, a problem shared is a blog post written, so let’s go for it.

I mentioned the weather yesterday, so this wasn’t unexpected. And yes, it’s great for the garden. But as I write – and with the rain still coming down hard – we’re looking at over 33% of the rain in the last four months having fallen in the last six hours. It’s dark and chilly and wintery.

And there’s no electricity.

“So how are you writing this, then?” I hear you ask.

Well, the answer is that I am peddling hard on my exercise bike, which I have hooked up to the grid at home. And we’re all good, as long as I can keep up the speed. If I slow down, however, then th

.

.

.

exactly.

Stage 6 loadshedding today, then (and remember as a rule of thumb, number of hours without electricity each day = Stage x 2) because of the breakdown of 8 (eight) generating units across the country, and the tacit promise of possibly more issues ahead because of the rains up north.

A true taste of what’s to come this winter. And it’s not pleasant.

Then, news that two World Tours have actually made it to South Africa. This has been a long-term gripe for a lot of people down here, and rightly so. We’ve mentioned it more than once, as well. So what I’m about to say might seem a little hypocritical, but I’m going to say it anyway.

The quality of the bands that are coming to SA… isn’t great.

I mean, like this:

This band coming over is problematic for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the fact that this will count as a potential strike against our indignation at being left out of numerous other “world” tours.
The argument will be: “You say that bands never come to SA, but I saw that the Backstreet Boys included two dates on their recent tour”, like that’s a feather in South Africa’s cap when the band in question haven’t had a hit record in almost 25 years, and clearly just need a bit of extra pocket money for drugs and plastic/orthopaedic surgery.

And secondly, the number of individuals using the line “Backstreet’s Back, alright!” when they hear the news. Don’t do it, please.

We don’t need this. Although, they did give us this amazing TV moment.

Amazing.

But the Backstreet Boys being back, alright! is still better – far, far better – than the other “world” “tour” that’s coming here. Because if you want to talk about grifters out to make a quick buck from a naïve public, well, you really need look no further:

Ah, jesus. What utter trash. The Mattias Rath of this age, peddling snake oil and pseudoscience to a sadly desperate public. And yes, the talk will be free, but don’t expect that there won’t be book sales and voluntary donations and supplements to buy and, and, and… Because if you think that this charlatan is doing this out of the goodness of his own heart (no pun intended), well, then you’re his perfect audience member.

Eish. What a day.

Oh. Wait. I mentioned poor service as well, didn’t I?

Well, the kitchen is still. not. finished. And they haven’t turned up to do anything about that this morning.

This week, and I say this with some degree of (probably misplaced) confidence, can surely only get better.

.

Right?

The race

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Lots to get done today, as we finally settle into the routine of the New Year, several (or more) days after most people have. But I also want to watch some football, so it’s been a case of racing around getting jobs done while there’s some electricity, and leaving the other non-electrical stuff until the power is out.

Talking of, there was this tweet, which has set social media ablaze:

Mpho Makwana being the Chairperson of the Eskom board.

As a rule of thumb, you can multiply the stage of loadshedding by two to work out the approximate number of hours you’ll be without power each day. What seems to be being suggested here is that we’ll be without power for four to six hours every day for until 2025.

And while I get the supposed “benefit” of the “predictability” aspect, even if this is implemented, there’s absolutely no guarantee that there won’t be higher stages than 2 or 3 at any time. And we just don’t know when those will be, because we can’t predict them. And that does kind of rule out the above “benefit”, almost immediately.

It seemingly also removes any actual benefit of lower stages of loadshedding being a possibility.

But this was just a tweet of an alleged quote made at a news conference (foolishly, too: no-one will remember a damn thing of the other important messages from the 2+ hour session), and there are plenty of ifs, buts and maybes to work through before it actually happens – if it ever does.
What it doesn’t say is this:

But then journalist Denene isn’t going to get her clicks without pretending that it does.

Let’s wait and see what happens.

Real quick

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This blog has been going for over 11 years with daily postings now. That’s both rather amazing and rather sad in almost equal amounts. And of course, there have been times when I have come very close to missing a deadline or forgetting to stick a post up. On other occasions, events have conspired against me, and I’ve either got lucky or made some scrambling plan to get a post out before time runs out on the day.

Things were going swimmingly today after a tourist trip to the Waterfront. Arriving home to expected loadshedding, I cooked dinner (gas hob, see?) and was waiting for the power to come back on when it promptly didn’t. And suddenly, you wonder if it’s going to be 10 minutes (it’s not) or 10 hours (I’ll let you know) before we have electricity again.

The UPS on the internet (our bit of it at least) won’t last that long, so I’m here to get a real quick post out… “just in case”.

This is that post.

For the record, the Waterfront was actually rather nice. Crowded, yes, but not hectic. Touristy, yes, but no more than you might expect (and I was with a tourist). Sunshine, beer and some fish & chips made for a lovely few hours out and about.

88:88

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An absolute treat for us Chez 6000 today, as we might be lucky enough to go the whole day without a power cut. But that’s more down to luck than anything else. The country is on Stage 3, which would generally mean about six hours off for most people. But in Cape Town, they’ve managed (for the moment) to reduce that to Stage 1:

The 180-megawatt Steenbras Hydro Pump Station (SHPS) consists of four turbines that are used to generate electricity. During peak electricity demand, it channels water from Upper Steenbras to Lower Steenbras, through the turbine generator, to create electricity.

When electricity usage is low, usually between 11pm and 7am, the turbines pump the water back to the Upper Steenbras Dam to be re-used the next day. In this way, SHPS operates like a battery. The amount of electricity that it can generate in one day is limited by the capacity of the lower reservoir.

Thus about two-thirds of the water used to generate power during the day is pumped back at night to the upper Steenbras reservoir to create more space for continual utilisation of the power station.

It’s more like charging the cellphone battery at night for usage during the following day. Cape Town is the only city in South Africa to own and operate a large pumped hydroelectric scheme. 

And then, thanks to the way that the timetable works, we have been fortunate enough to not be scheduled for any cuts in Stage 1 today.

Woohoo.

And there are rumours that Eskom has been saving up emergency reserve capacity over the past few day in order to give us relief from loadshedding for tomorrow as well:

Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer says that Eskom will do its best to keep the lights on for Christmas but warned that things could change very quickly.

“It is our intention not to have load shedding on Christmas Day; however, we are monitoring the situation,” he said.

The current outlook, barring any challenges over the next day or so, is that emergency reserves will have to be used to keep load shedding at bay. The intention is to keep load shedding suspended for at least ‘large parts’ of Christmas, he said.

Two days without blackouts. Aren’t we fortunate?

Look, I’ve taken the outrageously bold step of resetting all the clocks in the house. There’s no point in doing that usually, because they will all need resetting 4 hours later. But with (possibly) two days off, I’m going to indulge myself and be able to glance at the oven, bedroom clock or the microwave and get an accurate assessment of the time, rather than the usual 88:88.

I’m happy that we’re loadshedding free for these couple of days. It does help. But I’m also mindful that we need to avoid normalising this situation, or even celebrating it in some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome way. We shouldn’t have to be hoping to have electricity. It should be there.

But this situation isn’t going to change any time soon:

At least, not for the better…

ESP Screenshot

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The go to app for all your loadshedding info has to be Eskom se poe… Eskom se PUSH, which will inform you exactly when your next slots of misery are due. Super useful, free (but therefore full of ads), and… well… it just works. There are, however, a couple of unnecessary embellishments, like their social media community chat thing, for example. This was probably added because everything needs to somehow be a social media community chat thing these days. That’s what the world seems to think, at least.

The trouble is that their social media community chat thing is not very well monitored, and this is South Africa, which makes it a hot bed of fake gnus…

…and often (not even) thinly veiled racism.

I don’t subscribe to the social media community chat thing because of these reasons, and because it’s actually of very little use, even when the comments aren’t lies or discrimination, but I still get a little snapshot each time I log on, presumably to try to encourage (?!?) me to get involved.
Stuff like this from “Bishop”:

Not a very ecclesiastical thing to say, Your Grace.

This was 17 hours ago, which means that Bishop has had at least three power cuts since it was written. One can only imagine the state of his diocese, given the promised loose stools which will presumably have repeatedly prevailed.

Eww. Messy. (And I don’t mean the overrated footy one.)

There is a serious side to this (other than the awful stuff that gets shared on their social media community chat thing), being that the reaction of the Bishop here is a snapshot all of us in SA right now: desperate, angry, overwhelmed, worried… and about to loose our shiit.
And while there is absolutely every justification for feeling this way, it achieves nothing at all, save for working us each towards an earlier grave. Sad.