EDITORIAL | C’mon, Eskom, please lighten the load for all of us

It is the Groundhog Day of letters of regret — those notifications from Eskom in which they “regret to inform” South Africans that load-shedding is about to start, or they have upped the level.

Talk about taking this abusive relationship between our one and only power utility and consumers to another level: they changed the rules a long time ago but we are stuck with no place to go.

No longer is there even the courtesy of timely notice that load-shedding is on the cards.

So it was cold comfort — but hardly surprising — that Eskom announced on Tuesday the country was moving to stage 4 of load-shedding, leaving South Africans to contend with several outages in one day. Stage 4 requires that up to 4,000MW of the national load be shed — double the amount in stage 2. This equates to 12 outages of two-and-a-half hours over a four-day period or 12 four-hour outages in eight days. The Eskom load-shedding model allows for up to stage 8, equal to 12 hours a day with no power.

This is not something we have seen yet but a casual reference to stage 6 on Tuesday was hair-raising. Not only is load-shedding extended till Friday from the initial Wednesday, but: “At this stage we do not envision stage 6 being necessary this week. We are hoping that will continue to be the case,” group executive for generation Philip Dukashe said.

It is difficult to find a confident note in that statement. Rather, what South Africans are hearing is that Eskom’s executives are merely hoping for better days. Also, load-shedding will not end by Friday. This day was only mentioned because that is when a call will be made on when and how long the next round will be.

And chew on the words of Eskom’s head of transmission Segomotso Scheepers, who warned that, under extreme circumstances, the country might see up to 101 days of blackouts this winter. This compared with 65 days in the previous financial year.

The words “unplanned” and “partial losses” were thrown around, excuses South Africans have heard one too many times. Other reasons — all for which solutions exist — were bandied about.

CEO Andre de Ruyter said while there was an additional 200MW of power available from independent power producers, they are contractually prevented from feeding this into the grid because of government regulations. Also hampering repairs and much-needed maintenance was the R7.2bn debt by municipalities. “This would have helped with planned maintenance,” he said.

These are huge problems our government alongside Eskom need to act on urgently. Experts recommend faster decision-making, regulatory reforms and revised power sector strategies.

But for the man in the street, these are all just words. At the end of the day, after all the reasons for this situation had been discussed at length, South Africans still have to rely on themselves to make a plan to deal with this economy-killing, load-shedding machine.

Instead of improving as promised, the electricity supply crisis is getting worse every year. The “boiling frog” syndrome comes to mind but if no solution arrives soon, the only way this will end is with anger and frustration boiling over.