Cabinet has been briefed by Eskom about the risk of a total national electricity blackout – and the US embassy in Pretoria has drawn up an evacuation plan partly designed to get its staff out safely if the lights go off in South Africa once and for all.
Senior government sources told City Press that Eskom late last year presented a bleak picture of what would happen if load shedding failed and the system shut down completely.
“It’s a fact. They said we needed to do maintenance because the system was unreliable and would shut down,” said a senior government official.
Eskom warned government that, if the system crashed, it would take at least two weeks to reboot.
A second official privy to the information presented to Cabinet said the “two-week warning” was based on what had happened in California when its electricity system shut down in 2011.
“When your car battery is flat, you need additional capacity to be able to boost it. This is how our system works. California had to buy an amount of power equal to their total capacity to be able to reboot their system,” the second official said.
“We don’t want to go there, because all our neighbors are buying from us. No one in Africa has 42 000MW of power.”…
South Africa Today – South Africa News
