The dragon of darkness is looming over South Africa as the holidays grind to a halt and traffic begins to clog up the highways. The threat of rolling blackouts, which plunged South Africa into darkness in the run-up to Christmas and cost retailers billions, has resurfaced.
Chris Yelland, electricity pundit and managing director of EE Publishers, said he believed there need to be more – not fewer – planned blackouts in the coming months. This is because Eskom admitted that over the low-demand holiday season, it had 8000MW of unplanned outages and only 5000MW of planned outages.
Yelland said this figure, which meant that a third of the country’s 40000MW grid was out of action, was unacceptable.
“It needs to be reversed,” Yelland said. “Planned outages need to be increased if we are going to get the unplanned numbers down.”
Yelland said there was no doubt that a new round of blackouts were on the way.
But Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger was reluctant to provide a definite answer on this point, saying this week that the possibility of power cuts depended on whether the open cycle gas turbines could keep adding 2000MW of power a day to the stuttering grid…
South Africa Today – South Africa News
