I’ve been avoiding the topic of load shedding for the last few days. The reasons for this are:
1) Everyone else has spoken about it
2) I have nothing particularly new to say on the matter.
One of the reasons that I’ve decided to talk about it finally is that there’s a distinct lack of interesting political issues to rant about.
Secondly my opinion changed about 30 minutes ago when I was told that the power would be going off at ten o’clock in the evening. Ten! What the hell do they need to turn the power off at ten o clock in the evening for? Surely there isn’t that much power being used? Surely it’s not as though they can just save the power for a rainy day.
I’m not going to write massive rant about how Eskom is useless and they should all be cut into 16th’s and fed to the pigs’ ala Snatch. What I am going to talk about is a couple of issues I’ve considered through conversations in the past week.
1) Why does the load shedding system work the way it does? Surely it would make more sense to shut down residential areas in the daytime and industrial areas and office parks during the evening?
2) Why does Eskom not police the situation more? I mean you drive on the highway at night past massive corporate offices and they are lit up like a Christmas tree. Surely Eskom can look at a grid, tell what is happening at a specific spot and up the rate of those wasting electricity.
3) Why have we not heard anything from Eskom?
4) Surely the government should give grants to the average household or business that firstly installs a generator and secondly has below average consumption habits?
5) Since they cut power to neighboring countries why hasn’t the situation gotten better?
The biggest question though is this one:
1) Where did this little dilemma come from? I seem to remember the winter of 2007 having next to no problems and suddenly there is a power problem? I don’t understand where this issue arose. It’s not as though there was a power lack so they load shed once a week and then twice a week and then every day like they’re doing now. Suddenly out of nowhere there is a power cut every day! How the hell does this suddenly happen? As I’ve said before, surely this is a gradual issue that gets worse as demand increases not instantly.
I think the sooner Eskom admits that they stuffed up and broke something the sooner we can all get on with our lives and save up to buy generators.
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