When Eskom hands you lemons...

Originally posted in 2008--Edited today

I happened upon a thought provoking article on the web today, in a place I didn't expect to find it.

Tessa Silberbauer, writing for IOLjobs, had this to say:

"The other evening, while sitting and looking at the puddle of candlelight in front of a mirror, I had to laugh at myself.

"For all my belief in saving resources and environmental awareness, I've still been spoiled by "progress": I've forgotten so much.

"How to word-count longhand work, for example (I had to re-write this article by hand to conserve battery power, after writing the original on my PC just before a power cut). And I've become so used to having light when I want it, that I've forgotten how little I really need.

"I'm not alone in responding to power cuts, with anger sometimes. I know that there are serious losses, and that these are hurting us all. But there are also advantages to take, when we focus on our abilities rather than what we can't control.

"We can choose whether to be part of the solution, or part of the problem. Most of the time, it will be a mixed effect; but there is no excuse for refusing to do what we can, just because our contribution is small. " (see the rest of Tessa's excellent article here: http://www.ioljobs.co.za/article_view.php?fArticleId=4237298)

Being part of the solution does not mean that our contributions must be gargantuan. A grain of sand is minute, but enough of them make up a beach. And while your contribution may be only the size of a grain of sand...remembering to shut off your geyser during peak times, for example...if every household in South Africa did just that one thing, our power problem would be diminished significantly.

A painless way to be part of the solution is the change your attitude. Instead of revelling in the "kick 'em while they're down" mob-mentality of blaming Eskom and demanding pointless action (like sacking the managers, which is monumentally stupid and counterproductive), we can channel our energy into a positive, productive course of action. Tell our friends that moaning makes things worse, not better, because Eskom and the government already know there is a problem, so it's time for us all to look to solutions.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my husband's auntie, who is a bank manager in Natal. Her bank gets power cuts at about 2 in the afternoon, and sometimes her town also gets a second power cut in the evening. Now you may not realize it, but even after banks close their doors at 3, work continues inside the bank...work that ordinarily requires electricity. Auntie is very service oriented, and it bothers her that her customers, who have only a short window of opportunity to use the bank anyway, are losing an hour (and sometimes more) of opportunity to use her services. Her solution has been to install UPSs and soon her bank will be open, even during power outages. She is turning this into a marketing opportunity by posting discreet signs in her bank and at the ATMs (and is considering taking out ads in her local newspaper) advertising this fact. Not only will her customers remain loyal, but she expects her ability to remain open and functioning during the outages may draw new customers to her bank. The lady has a firm grip on the concept of taking the lemons of the power crisis and turning them into the sweet lemonade of opportunity.

Another friend of mine reports that they have dug out the old board games and play Monopoly and Scrabble and cards in the evening when the power is down. Where they used to go to separate rooms to watch TV and play video games, the family is now coming together and interacting. More lemonade.

Silberbauer's comment about being spoiled is well-taken. Since when can we not live for two hours without electricity? So, you are expected to adapt a little, change how you do things, make some plans and organize your time and activities around a short loss of power...so what? How selfish can we be, expecting our personal situations to be the hub of the universe? Can we not look for the good that can come out of adversity? Can we not take advantage of the downtime to replenish, relax, reconnect? Have we forgotten that electricity is our servant and not our master?

Being mad at Eskom only hurts you by feeding a negativity of spirit...it doesn't hurt Eskom or change the situation, it only changes you...and for the worse. Scheming to punish Eskom by lawsuits or demanding a management change or, worse, attacking Eskom employees, accomplishes nothing positive. Money awarded through lawsuits takes money away from projects designed to alleviate the crisis and, ultimately, comes out of YOUR pocket and the pockets of people like you, because Eskom's profits go to your government...and its losses come from your government, which you support with your taxes. It is never wise to change horses in midstream, and a new management team for Eskom will inevitably cause delays downstream...where the work of alleviating the power shortage is being done. And what good does it do to pinion an Eskom employee and demand answers from him or even assault him for the power issues? Better to look in a mirror and ask, "what have I done to contribute to this problem and what am I doing to help resolve it?" because you will get more answers there than from the poor guy who comes to read your meter and knows no more about what his bosses are doing than you do.

So, the government, through refusing to give Eskom the go-ahead to start building power stations years back, has handed you a basket of lemons. I'd be interested in knowing what you have done to make lemonade out of them.

Generators, Eskom, and my wallet

Hubby is an engineering manager for Eskom and, as such, has access to information the rest of us don’t have. A few weeks back, based on some of that insider knowledge, he began to consider having a generator fitted to our house and wired into the DB board so that in the event of a power cut or failure, we could still have electricity.

We had a brief discussion over the weekend and, for a considerable variety of reasons, have decided against it, despite knowing that the load shedding may continue for as many as five or more years. Access to the funds to do so is not an issue…we have a comfortable income, investments that could be liquidated if necessary, excellent credit and a huge amount of equity in both our home and our rental property. Access to the cash to add a generator and have it professionally installed so that it would automatically start up and switch over at the drop of a KW is no problem for us.

The problem lies in our assessment of the situation. We have come to the conclusion that it is the wrong thing to do for a variety of reasons:

1) First of all, we decided that we can live without electricity for 2 to 3 hours per day. The notion that our lives will crumble and fall apart because we can’t watch Oprah or Noot vir Noot is just stupid. Yes, it will be inconvenient, but since when are we guaranteed convenience in our lives? I mean, how spoiled can I be that I resent having to light a couple of candles and read a book or play scrabble or cards with my husband?

To be honest, it just wasn’t that hard to arrange my maid’s work around the outages. Since, if we are going to have an outage, it usually occurs between noon and 2:30, I’ve restructured her work schedule so that, during that period of time, she is doing things that don’t require electricity, like sweeping, mopping, dusting, washing windows, changing beds, etc. She can vacuum and do the wash as soon as she gets here, and when the power returns at 2:30, she can do the ironing and any other chores requiring electricity.

Why can’t my own work be arranged that way? The blackouts are a good time to do tasks that don’t require electricity, whether it is cleaning out cupboards, clearing out the garage or wendy house, sorting and filing papers, or hauling stuff. Sitting down and thinking of ways to be productive without electricity for a paltry two hours a day may not exactly be easy, but who among us was promised that life would be easy?

My own father was raised in a household without electricity or running water or telephones…and he’s still alive and kicking (and fully electrified). All of our ancestors until about a hundred years or so ago, lived their entire lives without the stuff. How can we be such whingers over losing its benefits for a trifling two hours every couple of days?

2) Purchasing a generator is quite a financial commitment…I’d rather spend the money elsewhere. The cost/benefit just doesn’t move me to parting with thousands of rand: how much is a couple of hours of electricity a couple of times a week worth to me, anyway? Not that much!

3) One thing nobody has thought of is the pollution problem. If you run a diesel or petrol generator, you are going to create both noise and air pollution. Having that diesel generator clattering along at the back of your garage would be very much like having a large diesel truck sitting there, idling for a couple hours and pumping a mass of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Imagine if all of your neighbours also had the equivalent of a diesel truck idling in their gardens all at the same time…

4) Then there is the matter of fuel. First, you have the logistics of keeping your generator fuelled: you’ve got to get fuel containers, then you have to fill them…which is not going to be cheap. Then you have to transport them safely. Then you have to have a safe place to store them…how close to your bedroom or lounge or children’s playroom do you want a fuel dump? And, of course, there is the matter of filling the beast and then going out again for more fuel.

Second, if we all decide to run out and buy generators for our homes…even if that many generators are available at prices we can pay…we will put huge pressure on fuel availability. And what happens when a commodity is in short supply? The cost increases.

Did someone say “biofuels”? Well, if we are dealing in futures here, eventually Eskom is going to get this sorted out and we won’t have the load shedding anymore. Biofuels come with their own set of problems, including lack of immediate availability. And, frankly, in a country where poverty-induced hunger is still a significant social issue, I have serious moral qualms about removing food sources from the reach of the poor just so I can surf the net while my neighbour’s house is dark. Only if I can be absolutely guaranteed that turning corn into fuel won’t make the price of corn rise or reduce the availability of cheap mielies for poor people, will I consider biofuels a viable solution. It is more important for poor people to eat than for middle class people to have light.

5) One of the things we are not considering is that this is a short term problem. Do I want to spend thousands of rand to purchase an alternative power source for my house when, in just a few years, it won’t be needed? Ok, if my power was down 4 hours every day, I might consider it, depending on what time of the day the outages were occurring. Or, if this is what electric service was going to be from this day forward…then it might make sense to have the alternative power. But two hours just a few times a month? Sound like a huge waste of money to me.

6) Which brings me to our final reason for rejecting the idea of installing a generator: cost effectiveness. It ain’t.

Diesel generators costs thousands of rand. Installing it so it will power at least a few of your mains plugs isn’t free, and setting it up to automatically switch over isn’t free either. Then you have to count the cost of fuel and maintenance of the generator (just like the engine of a diesel bakkie, it’s going to need maintenance from time to time). Add this all up and divide it by the number of hours you think you are going to need it this year. If you get hit with load shedding twice a week, that’s about 5 hours a week or 260 hours per year. Assuming you can do all your own electrical installation without frying yourself or your house wiring, what is it going to cost you?

Well, a generator big enough to supply a small household can run you R10 000, assuming you are not buying a name brand like Honda or Cummins. One that I investigated has a 12.5 litre fuel tank and will run about 12 hours on a tank of fuel. So, assuming best case scenario, i.e., no maintenance required on the generator, no increase in petrol/diesel prices, you average two outages a week and the power crisis is solved in 5 years, allowing you to retire the generator, how much is that 2.5 hours per day going to cost you via generator? Just under R22, or about R44 per week. Now, let’s assume the criteria remains constant, but the power crisis is resolved in 2 year: just over R50 per day, or R100 per week. If fuel prices rise, so will this operating cost. If the number of load shedding incidents drop to less than an average of two per week, the average operating cost will also rise. And, if you had to hire someone to do the installation, that cost will be higher still. Bottom line…are you prepared to fork out R400 a month for 20 hours of electricity? What do you think you will be doing with that electricity that it is worth R400 over and above your current expenses? Washing a load of clothes? Surfing the net? Watching TV?

For me, it seems a lot of cost and not a lot of benefit. The outages don’t happen that often, and when they do happen, they don’t last that long. I can live without a couple of hours of electricity…I could do it every day, if I had to, without much difficulty. Oh, I’d have to give some thought to things I could do by natural sunlight or candlelight, but I like to think and solve puzzles, so it’s no biggie.

When I consider that my father grew up in a house with no electricity, that he was able to finish high school (including homework), that he ate nutritious meals and didn’t suffer from food poisoning, even though they didn’t have refrigeration, it tells me that being deprived of my power two hours each day is a very tiny sacrifice for the benefit of my adopted homeland.

What can you do when your electricity goes out?

Eskom, yet again

I received a very nice comment on my last blog entry:

We decided to start a website aimed at constructively addressing the problem, getting people involved and seeking solutions and alternatives...

Feel free to visit http://www.shedhappens.co.za/ . The site has only been running for a week now, but we honestly believe that it has a lot of potential to become a valuable nationwide tool in solving this problem.

Pointing fingers at this stage will not help us. We must look at sustainable long term solutions.

I am chuffed that I am not the only person who recognizing that whingeing and finger-pointing is not the solution to the power shortages here, and particularly encouraged that someone has actually started a website dedicated to solutions to the problem rather than just pissing and moaning about it.

I encourage you to visit the site, join up, read the comments and forums, and make your own contributions. We really are not entirely helpless in this situation and by helping ourselves and each other, we can help take some of the pressure off Eskom and thereby allow them to commit their resources to fixing the problem rather than defending themselves against continual attack.

When we all pull in the same direction, we get there faster.

Eskom, again

Ok, I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m getting tired of the whinging and shit-stirring.

This evening Hubby and I watched 3rd Degree and, due to the host’s continual interrupting and badgering, were unable to get much coherent information out of the guest from Eskom. My patience at an end, I fired off the following email to the program.

First of all, I was appalled at Debra Patta’s rudeness to Steve Lennon on tonight’s program. She repeatedly interrupted him and was sharp and offensive in both her manner and her words. Frankly, I was a great deal more interested in what he had to say than in her grandstanding.

Secondly, the primary source of this problem is the government’s refusal to allow Eskom to build new plants when it warned of the impending power crisis as much as 10 years ago. I don’t blame the waiter when the cook burns the bacon...why blame Eskom for not building additional power plants when they were refused both the permission and the funds to do so?

Isn’t it about time that the media, including programs like 3rd Degree, stopped fanning the flames of discontent and started focusing on the fix? Eskom put an additional 1000MW on the grid last year and will have another 1000MW up within the next year or so. Negative reporting like Debra Patta’s inquisition actually HURTS recovery because it makes people want to quit working for Eskom (employees are being accosted and abused by the citizenry in public!) and discourages others from wanting to work for the company.

Why not stop beating the dead horse of fault finding and try to find a way to help Eskom fix the problem? Fostering an adversarial situation between Eskom and its consumers may sell newspapers and draw viewers, but it does absolutely nothing to help resolve the problem of the energy shortage. It is self-serving, mean spirited, and short sighted.

No reply so far, but if I ever get one, I’ll post it here.

More madness: Eskom's woes

Last night Hubby and I had dinner with a friend who works for the Ministry of Trade and Industry. She, like many of us, is concerned about the power outages. I gleaned some very interesting insights from their conversation.

Eskom has made the news again with the announcement that it has reduced its headcount by half in the last twelve years and now it is suffering from a critical skills shortage which is negatively impacting its ability to resolve the present power shortfall. The citizenry, predictably, is outraged, ignorant of (or ignoring) the pragmatic reasons for such a situation having come to pass. The government, hypocritically, is calling Eskom on the carpet, tasking the company with resolving the problem that is, in truth, one of government’s own making.

Eskom has known for years that this power crisis was looming. Over the past decade or so, Eskom has quietly recommissioned mothballed power plants, converting its excess generating capacity over to active use to serve increasing power demands country-wide. But, due to short-sightedness on the part of government (by refusing to authorize the funds to build new plants), Eskom was unable to build new power plants to replace the excess capacity and over time, Eskom came to have no reserves of any significance.

According to President Mbeki, Eskom repeatedly asked for authorization of the funds to build new power plants and they were refused because the plans were for building “excess capacity.” This is immensely short-sighted because an electric power plant isn’t like a litre of milk…you can’t just run down to the store to get another one when you run out of power. The gas-fired plants in Atlantis and Mossel Bay are quick to build…18 months or so…but they cost THIRTY TIMES what a conventional plant costs to run! They cannot be run at a profit unless the rates you and I pay for electricity go up. WAY up.

So, Eskom found itself on the horns of a dilemma: government won’t turn loose of funds to build new power plants, the company is expected to generate a profit along with its electricity, and there are a lot of employees…in particular, the guys ordinarily involved in the planning, designing, and building of new power plants…who have nothing to do. Eskom can’t raise its rates, can’t build new power plants…so what does it do? Well, it cuts the unnecessary staff, of course. What else could it do?

When a company is mandated to be profitable but is prevented from raising its rates to accommodate inflation or salary increases to its employees or the increase in the costs of goods and services it must use, what steps can it take to fulfil its mandate? Obviously, if it cannot increase its rates, it has only two possible paths: increase sales or reduce overhead…or both. Eskom has done both…and now the whole of South Africa is paying for it.

With the country’s annual growth rate presently at 4%, Eskom has increased its sales, because a growth in the economy requires additional electricity to support it: it sold more electricity, so it made more money. To sustain that rate of growth, however, Eskom needs to add 1600MW to the grid annually. Until recently, it has done so by bringing its mothballed excess capacity power plants…the “back ups”… back on line…but what happens when we run out of back up plants just sitting out there on the veld, waiting for their turn to go onto the grid? We get power shortages.

Eskom has reduced its overhead as well, but a corporation’s ability to do that is limited. Eskom doesn’t have warehouses full of electricity they can divest themselves of, they can’t sell their assets. The easiest and most cost-effective way to trim the budget and reduce overhead is to reduce personnel and reduce salaries, increases, and benefits to the personnel who remain. This, of course, has a knock on effect of the remaining personnel being dissatisfied with their reduced circumstances and sends them off looking for new jobs, further reducing the overhead. In America we call this “downsizing,” and Eskom has downsized its human overhead by 50% in the last twelve years. So, while the demand on its product has been growing, Eskom has been shrinking…but it has managed to meet its mandate from its sole shareholder, government, to be profitable.

Well, now it has come back to bite us in the butt. The excess capacity is used up and because government specifically refused to allow Eskom to build excess capacity to replace that which was converted to active service, we have no back up, no reserve generating capacity. Now that government has recognized its error and reversed itself, tasking Eskom with building 20 new power plants over the next 20 years, Eskom no longer has the trained personnel…or even, in some cases, the training programs…to effect a rapid remedy of the situation.

Worst of all, due to alarmist media stories, people are angry with Eskom for a situation not of its making. Even government, the actual perpetrator of this fiasco, is holding Eskom’s feet to the fire…talk about blaming the victim! Essentially government is saying “Yeah, we refused to give you the money to avert this disaster, but that is your fault because you didn’t make us listen.”

So, today Eskom is chasing a moving target. Eskom needs to add 1600MW annually to the grid in order to sustain a growth rate of 4%. Government is pushing for a target growth rate of 6% growth, which will require Eskom to add 2400MW to the grid annually, just to keep up with growth, never mind putting in excess capacity. It takes about eight years to build a conventional power plant, with the cost in the BILLIONS; it takes longer and costs more to build nukes, presently the only viable solution for the Cape and other places that don’t have immediate access to coal beds.

The gas-fired plants in Atlantis and Mossel Bay are just fingers in the dike. They added 1000MW to the grid last year (but we needed 1600), and they took 18 months to build. Eskom is hard at work building more gas-fired generating capacity in these locations, but at the end of the build they will have added 2000MW to the grid and a 4% growth rate will have required 4800 in the same time frame. Eskom is chasing a moving target and while they can catch up, it’s going to get worse here for a while before it gets better.

Don’t be surprised if Eskom begins reporting operating at a loss over the next few years. But don’t take it as further proof of management incompetence, take it as proof that Eskom will sacrifice whatever necessary…including profits…to keep your lights on at a reasonable price. You see, the only short-term solution to the power shortage is to build those gas-fired plants. Nothing else can go from bare dirt to fully operational in such a short time. But the cost to operate these plants is 30x higher than a conventional plant because they burn diesel fuel. Under normal circumstances these plants would only operate two or three hours per day, during peak demand times, and remain idle the rest of the time. Due to the government’s refusal to allow Eskom to replace the excess generating capacity that was pressed into service to support the country’s growth, these expensive peak time generators are running up to 20 hours a day to supply much needed capacity to the grid. When put into service only a few hours a day, their high cost of operation is not an important factor. But running flat out for extended periods of time is going to have a significant deleterious effect on Eskom’s bottom line…it is likely to eat up all of the company’s profits and then some. Eskom can prevent those losses by raising its rates, but I don’t think the customers would like that as much as the company failing to post profits for a while. Remember, Eskom’s sole shareholder is government, so a rate increase that could restore Eskom to profitability…well those profits go into the government’s pocket, just as an operating loss comes out of it.

I hope not to hear any more cries about replacing Eskom’s management. The fault is much less with management than with an owner…government…that will not allow those managers to do what is necessary to keep the lights on. Cries to replace the management are just stupid…is there anyone here in South Africa who knows more about running a parastatal power utility than the guys who are doing it now? How does replacement = improvement?

Here’s hoping that we put on our thinking caps before we open our mouths. Eskom really is running as fast as it can, building new power plants and looking at new technologies to implement once the crisis is over. Tell the next anti-nuke nutjob who harangues you that we, in the Cape, are right now faced with three choices: noisy diesel generators running 20 hours a day and pumping pollutants into the atmosphere, clean, quiet nukes, or no power for half or more of each day (and that power to come from the existing nuke).

Once the Koeberg reactor that is presently down for refuelling comes back on the grid, the present crunch should be eased a bit. But make no mistake, Eskom is behind the curve now, thanks to government’s failure to heed timely warnings, and it is going to get worse before it gets better. It WILL get better, but it’s gonna take some time.

Eskom, South Africa's Prince of Darkness

Eskom is the supplier of electrical power to South Africa (and a few other places). Eskom, in fact, is one of the largest electricity generating companies in the world. Like in America, Eskom is owned by its shareholders; unlike America, Eskom has only one shareholder…the government. This makes it a “parastatal” company, one that is not technically owned by the government, but is, in fact, controlled by it.

Due to poor planning…mostly on the part of government…and unexpected population shifts, South Africa is presently experiencing a lot of planned power disruptions. Having lived through the summer of rolling blackouts in California, this is nothing new to me, and I know how to arrange my life around the power outages. Unfortunately, Eskom’s manner of handling the outages is not as efficient as Pacific Gas and Electric’s was, so we are often left in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

I understand the problems Eskom is experiencing and the citizen unrest against them is, in large part, unfair. But since when are people fair? They will yell at a waiter because the food is not properly prepared (when the fault is the cook’s), they will impeach an excellent governor in favour of an arrogant ass of an actor (when the fault was with scheming corporations over which that governor had no control), and they will blame Eskom for insufficient capacity when the fault is with the government for failing to heed Eskom’s warnings and authorize the funds to build more power plants.

That said, however, Eskom must take the rap for its egregious mishandling of the situation with its customers. Good communication can work wonders with a discontented group of people. With clear and proper explanations, people can understand a situation…even if they still don’t like it and remain unhappy with it. But knowledge makes people feel empowered and feeling empowered mitigates, to some degree, their enmity

The first place Eskom falls down is in its use of jargon. I am a reasonably intelligent person, literate and fairly well-informed, and I often have difficulty understanding what Eskom is trying to say. Luckily for me, my husband is a technical manager with Eskom and I can ask him to explain it to me…most South Africans, however, do not have this advantage and therefore remain in the dark. An example of this is when we had an automated shutdown of the local nuke a few years ago and the local news had terrifying headlines about the workers at the power plant “scrambling” to shut the plant down and avoid a catastrophe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. But the Eskom spokesperson who gave the media their information had committed the Sin of Jargon and the media folks who didn’t know the jargon just morphed it into something they did know, and terrifying headlines hit the streets. What the spokesperson had said was that the reactor had SCRAMmed, SCRAM being an industry acronym for a well-controlled automatic safety procedure the reactor engages when the sensors sense anything being even slightly out of whack. Nobody scrambled, no meltdown was narrowly averted, no panic had occurred or was necessary. But because the spokesperson did not explain SCRAM to the media, “the reactor SCRAMmed” was misinterpreted as the reactor crew scrambling and their creative juices flowed from there.

Another, more timely example, is the use of the phrase “load shedding.” What does that mean to you? Personally, I get a mental image of an overburdened little donkey shaking off some of its cargo…certainly nothing even remotely related to a power outage! I assumed my ignorance was due to me being foreign, that “load shedding” was a South African term that they all understood but I didn’t. After a conversation with a local woman last week, however, it became apparent that South Africans haven’t a clue either. They just take is as a euphemism for Eskom intentionally dumping their power.

Well, in one sense they are right, but because Eskom hasn’t adequately explained (in non-industry jargon) to its customers what load shedding is and how it works, people don’t get it. They see it as arbitrary, unpredictable, and therefore not something they can plan for…which pisses them off. And because the phrase “load shedding” is an Eskom invention that originally had nothing to do with shutting down residential and other non-industrial customers, there’s nothing in the term that would allow someone to intuitively grasp its meaning, like the PG&E term “rolling blackout.” Yup…that’s what it means…”rolling blackout.”

The woman I spoke with appeared to be of at least normal intelligence, but not only did she not understand what “load shedding" meant, she had no idea why Eskom was doing it. When I explained to her that these were rolling blackouts…that the power in my suburb was cut for two hours so that other people could have the electricity, then their power would be cut so that I (and others) could have electricity, and then, after two hours, yet another suburb would lose power for two hours, she quickly grasped it. The blackout rolls from suburb to suburb…an easy mental picture for anyone to form. So why can’t Eskom explain this in simple, easy-to-understand language devoid of industry jargon?

Now I am sure Eskom is confident that their website has all the answers. In fact, they are so confident that when my power went down unexpectedly the other day (my husband works for Eskom so I can actually find out where we are on the scheduled outages), I called Eskom to see if this was a scheduled outage or if there was another reason…like a car rammed a power pole…for my electricity to be down and got a recorded message that stated that Eskom was load shedding due to shortages (duh!) and to find out when my area was scheduled for load shedding, I should check their website. Now this is monumentally stupid for at least two reasons: 1) the majority of South Africans do not have computers and/or internet access and 2) those of us who do have computers and internet access cannot get to Eskom’s website…or any other website, for that matter…during a power outage! But somehow these very simple bits of fundamental information have escaped Eskom’s notice, so customers who awaken to find their power out…with no clue why, since load shedding at 6 am doesn’t seem especially logical…have no way of knowing if theirs is a scheduled outage that will resolve with time or some fault in the system that needs to be reported.

Being married to an Eskom engineering type, I tried to do the conscientious thing yesterday morning and go to the website and download an outage schedule for my area. Unfortunately, despite my fairly decent native intelligence and high degree of literacy, I was unable to make heads or tails of the thing. My interpretation was that if I was lucky, my power would be down from noon to 2:30, if I was unlucky, it would also be down from 6am to 8:30am, and if I was in a serious state of karma-debt, it would also be down from 8pm to 10:30pm as well. What days? No clue. How do I know which of those times would see me without power? No clue either.

Eventually, Hubby deciphered the danged thing for me and it turns out that you practically have to have an engineering degree (not to mention internet access at any and all times of the day) in order to use the blasted thing. It involves three pages of hoop-jumping (most of it egregiously non-intuitive) in order to input your city, get the hokey-looking dial that points to the colour that applies to your area, and then get the interpretation of your colour status. Hint: brown is bad.

Now you have to go to yet another page to determine what that brown means, because there are three degrees of brown. Brown1 means you’ll be out once during the day, Brown2 means twice, and Brown3 means three times. (Since the outages are now 2.5 hours each, why bother turning it back on at all?). On that third page you are supposed to see a chart that tells you what days of the week and the times you will be affected by Browns 1, 2, and 3. Interestingly, Hubby’s chart showed the days (he was accessing the website from inside Eskom’s network) and mine did not (I was accessing from outside).

Now if I, a veteran of California’s Summer of Rolling Blackouts, could not decipher this load shedding schedule without help from an Eskom insider, I’m wondering just how useful it is to other people who don’t even understand the concept of a rolling blackout. What, after all, in the words “load shedding” gives any indication of what is actually going on?

Addressing Eskom’s means of communicating the schedule for the blackouts, they couldn’t be doing a worse job. Aside from the aforementioned lack of access to the website for most of South Africa’s millions of Eskom users, there is the matter of that complicated, obtuse method of access the information for the minority of us that can get on line. PG&E had a simple and brilliant solution: on your electric bill there was a code number. That code corresponded to blackout schedule that was printed on the back of the bill. Simple…read your code, compare it to the chart, know when your power was going down.

In South Africa some of us have “prepaid” electricity, meters in our houses that we charge with a card purchased at any one of thousands of gas stations, 7-11 stores, and grocery stores. These people don’t get a monthly electric bill, but they do have to physically go to a shop to charge their cards, so a brochure with a colour-coded map could be handed out with each electricity pre-payment.

I don’t really blame Eskom for the inadequacy of the supply. They started warning government more than ten years ago that new power plants were necessary…they even had the plans ready for many of them…but government didn’t listen. I think it is supremely ironic that government today is haranguing Eskom and calling them on the carpet to explain the meagre supply when, in fact, government’s foot-dragging is at the core of the problem. The President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, has recently admitted as much. Eskom knew they needed new power plants, but government would not loosen the purse strings and now we are in a deficit situation…and with 2010 (World Cup) just around the corner.

Let’s just hope our electrician is as good to us as he has been in the past…Hubby has him coming out to give us an estimate for installing a generator to power the house during shut downs. Considering who Hubby works for, that’s pretty ironic in itself!

A new definition for stupid...

My husband works for the country’s power utility, Eskom, and while I think the company is often hard-done by in the press and public opinion, sometimes they do something so unarguably stupid that harsh criticism and ridicule is warranted. Take this afternoon, for example. I was merrily typing along when suddenly, the power went out. OK, I’ve got a laptop and therefore battery backup, but gone with the power is my internet connection (the router requires electricity), so while it’s not a train wreck, it is mighty inconvenient.

What makes this whole thing so incredibly stupid, however, is the recorded message I heard when I called Eskom to check if this was a known outage or if it needed to be reported. Speaking at the speed of light, a woman's voice rattles off the tidbit that “load shedding is currently happening in the Whgbysdysl*rel$gly,” followed by a slightly more intelligible admonition that I should check Eskom’s website for load shedding schedules for my region. I re-dialled the main number since, due to that lightning fast, garbled delivery the first time around, I didn’t get the area that was experiencing load shedding. Turns out it’s Western Region…what does that mean?

OK, I’m pretty sure I’m in the Western Region, but since we don’t have a so-named province and no towns are mentioned on the taped message, how do I know just who is affected? Is all of Cape Town down? All of the Western Province (Eskom is a national entity, after all)? Or is it just my little strip of civilization north of Cape Town and strung up along the western seaboard?

More to the point, however, is the little fact that the vast majority of the people in the country, including the majority of people served by Eskom, cannot afford either computers or internet service. How is Mbwelo, whose shack has gone dark and whose prized little bar fridge...which keeps a precious food store from spoiling...has stopped, supposed to find out when the township is going to be darkened?

And even more to the point…if the power has been shut down, exactly how am I or anyone else supposed to connect to that website to find out why the fridge is silent and the router dead? No power, no internet connection..DOH!

And what is with mid-day load shedding, anyway? The heaviest use of power is in the hours between 5 and 8 pm when people come home from work and turn on their kitchen stoves, fans, and televisions. Electricity isn’t like water, that you can keep bottled up for a mass use later on in the day. My lack of electricity this afternoon doesn’t mean that there will be extra electricity to spread around this evening, it just means that tasks I could be doing now, during low use hours (like washing and drying clothes) will have to be put off to later…peak use time…since the electricity isn’t available during low usage time.

Now that’s just stupid.

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UPDATE: well, the power’s back on and I decided to drop by Eskom’s site to check the load-shedding schedule. Guess what? My suburb is scheduled for load shedding between 6 pm and 8:30 pm. What…Eskom can’t tell time or do they think that I can’t?