What a load of shed!
Debate rages over Eskom monopoly
Roll out rooftop solar panels and empower communities to establish their own micro-electricity grids.
This proposal from Wildlife and Environment Society Algoa Bay branch chair Gary Koekemoer was one of half a dozen solutions that emerged on Monday as the monster of load-shedding – with an estimated cost to the national economy of between R20bn and R80bn a month – gripped Nelson Mandela Bay and the rest of the country.
Koekemoer said SA needed to increase investment in renewable energy.
“In this region of the Eastern Cape alone, we have 16 wind farms,” he said.
“The power goes to the national grid but already there is more than enough there to power a whole city.
“It shows the potential.
“If we increase investment in renewables and integrate it with a community power strategy, we can overcome loadshedding.”
SA had to find a way to supply electricity without killing the planet and poisoning local communities, Koekemoer said.
“Coal is doing both those things through climate change and air pollution, and is also questionable economically because we are not factoring in the hidden costs of the coal industry to community health, to our environment and to our roads from the coal trucks.”
Parallel to the push for renewables, the government needed to free up citizens to help themselves, he said.
“The present scenario will see the rich defecting from the grid after installing their own power-generation devices. “But what about the poor? “At the moment, they are compelled to steal electricity.
“The government needs to roll out solar panels in poor areas on the roofs of homes and schools, for example, and empower communities to link up and supply their own power through micro-grids.
“It’s an easy, quick no-brainer, and the question is why is the government not taking it up?”
While people could zerorate their electricity consumption through home innovations, legislation was needed to allow them to generate surplus power for sale to the grid.
Draft legislation in this regard had been sitting with the government for several years, and it had to be finalised and implemented, Koekemoer said.
The third part of the solution was to scrutinise the management of Eskom, which would likely mean cutting down the number of staff.
The stated concern of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) about this issue made no sense, he said.
“We have to consider all the jobs that will come from the efficient delivery of electricity rather than only the jobs created at source in a badly run utility.”
Free Market Foundation researcher Chris Hattingh said competition and decentralisation were the keys that would unlock the load-shedding mess.
The Mozambique cyclone which Eskom was blaming for the latest outages could not have been foreseen, but if there had been at least one other utility with its own infrastructure, load-shedding might have been avoided, he said.
SA’s history of apartheid had to be taken into account and, while it had functioned efficiently then, the huge upswing in mechanisation and high-energy-use industry since the advent of democracy had multiplied the pressure on the utility.
“However, the common denominators among countries with successful electricity supply models are competition and transparency so taxpayers can see where their tax money is going to,” Hattingh said.
South Africans had a natural gift for innovation and the hope was that a homegrown way would be found soon to reduce the price of renewables.
“Until then, we should probably use what resources are available to us, but it must be done on an open, competitive field.
“The bigger government and state utilities are, the more chance for corruption – so competition and decentralisation are the key words.”
On Numsa’s concern about jobs being lost at Eskom if the country’s power monopoly was split, he said the failing utility was already leaking jobs and more would open up as competitors appeared.
South African Institute of Race Relations analyst Terence Corrigan said load-shedding was of huge concern.
“In 2008, when the first phase of blackouts hit us, the general mood of South Africans changed for the first time since the advent of democracy to despondency, and it has never recovered.
“Besides the difficulties caused for ordinary people, talking to business people today the message is clear – loadshedding is a killer.”
While state-owned utilities could generate electricity, efficiency, reliability and cost-effectiveness needed to be embedded as the bottom line.
“We need good board oversight and proper management, and to get rid of affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment, which effectively ramps up costs.
“We need our utility to focus not on creating jobs but rather on its core business of generating and distributing electricity.”
Until these measures were implemented, complete or partial privatisation would not likely succeed, he said.
“Privatisation should be part of the conversation but even if there was a buyer, how much would they be able to slash the staff budget, if that was necessary?
“Would they be exempt from BEE?”
High Energy User Group spokesperson David Mertens said the industrial areas in Nelson Mandela Bay had not been affected by load-shedding.
“The industrial areas are only load-shedded when it is Stage Five.
“It has not affected us in our factories, but it remains a big problem for smaller businesses in other areas which do get load-shedded, such as in Newton Park,” Mertens said.
“It’s something that is completely unacceptable.
“Eskom has spent a lot of money on new power stations.
“The prices went up and they have nothing to show for it. It’s a total failure.”
Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Nomkhita Mona said the chamber was conducting research into the dire effects of load-shedding on local businesses. “The level of
load-shedding we are currently experiencing could cripple businesses and the larger economy if it is allowed to continue,” she said.
Mona said there had been no transparency from Eskom around what had caused such a significant and sudden lack of capacity – or why it was taking so long to find a remedy.
Numsa spokesperson Phakamile Hlubi said the union believed that load-shedding was a deliberate ploy by the ANC.
“The ANC wants to create and deepen the crisis at Eskom and has gone out of its way to hire a team of incompetent officials to run this state-owned enterprise into the ground so that it can justify its privatisation and selling it off to the private sector.
“It doesn’t care that electricity prices are already unaffordable and by privatising Eskom it would make it even more unaffordable.
“The ANC is deliberately destroying Eskom after it looted and destroyed Eskom through corruption and through the appointment of incompetent cronies.”
Workers would pay through massive job losses, she said.
The union has been vocal in its objection to independent power producers, saying that they contributed to the high tariffs that electricity consumers would be paying from April 1.
Numsa secretary-general Irvin Jim said electricity supplied from these entities would result in an oversupply and, because Eskom would not make enough from the sale of electricity, it would be forced to make up the shortfall through tariff increases.
He argued that the introduction of independent power producers into the energy mix would mean that several coalfired power stations in Mpumalanga would be shut down, which would result in the loss of 100,000 coal jobs.
“There is no social plan in place for the province of Mpumalanga which will allow workers to be retrained and absorbed in other sectors.
“Both the ANC government and the National Energy Regulator of South Africa have chosen to ignore this reality.”
Congress of South African Trade Unions president Zingiswa Losi said small and medium enterprises should list their challenges and give the government a list of interventions needed.
“We need to talk about long-term planning so that we can save jobs.”
Losi said the reasons for load-shedding were irrelevant – what was important was the effect it was having on businesses.
“We will not allow job losses as a result of inadequacy and poor planning, particularly if the impact is going to be such that small businesses will have to close down.
“It will go against what the president said in his state of the nation address – that the government will pay special attention to small, medium and micro-enterprises because they are the key in driving the economy and job creation,” Losi said.
DA media liaison Marshallé Frederiks said the DA planned to introduce the Independent Systems and Market Operator Bill in the next parliament.
The bill would secure energy supply in the country and make it more affordable for all citizens.
The aim was to split Eskom into a generation entity that could be private and a transmission entity to be operated by the state to enable independent power producers to connect to the grid and open up competition in the energy market, he said.
“The latest draft of the bill is with legal services.
“They are stretched resource-wise until after the elections dealing with current bills and legislation.
“As soon as we can get the draft certified, it will be introduced to parliament.”
‘Eskom has spent a lot of money on new power stations. It’s a total failure’ David Mertens
HIGH ENERGY USER GROUP SPOKESPERSON
The buzz word in SA today is “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
You will rarely hear any government official making a speech without throwing in something about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and how SA is at the centre of it.
In another time and space, we might have believed this – what with all the investment in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and other big data technologies.
But not today.
Today we are incapable of being moved by this rhetoric, because for the past few days, we have been on the receiving end of a load-shedding crisis that is devastating individuals and businesses alike.
How then do we make sense of the Fourth Industrial Revolution when basic things, such as electricity, are in a state of crisis?
The tragedy and perhaps the joke in all this is that electricity was at the centre of the Second Industrial Revolution that took place between 1870 and 1912.
That is right. The most significant technological system that came about back in the Second Industrial Revolution was electrical power.
This saw massive factory electrification and a production line anchored on electrified sequential operations that produced end-products for consumption much faster than had been the case previously.
Because electric power provides energy that can be converted into other forms of energy such as light, heat or motion, it can be carried long distances.
This is why electrification made allowance for advancements in manufacturing and production technology that led to the massification of technological systems, such as complex sewage systems and telephones.
It is for this reason that talks about the Fourth Industrial Revolution in SA are devastatingly tragic.
As we speak, millions of people have been affected by rotational load-shedding, with some areas experiencing several hours of blackouts at a rate of at least twice a day.
The power utility, Eskom, implemented stage four loadshedding at the weekend.
On Saturday evening, it implemented stage two, and just as we were breathing a sigh of relief, on Sunday it went right back to stage four.
This is deeply problematic for a number of reasons.
Firstly, logic dictates that the demand for electricity is higher in the winter months because this is when the grid is under immense pressure from households and businesses using a lot of electricity to keep warm.
In summer months, however, demand for electricity is much lower.
And yet this load-shedding is hitting us during the summer season, which in the southern hemisphere began on December 22 2018 and will end on March 20 2019.
If we are battling with electricity right now, what of the coming winter season?
Secondly, logic also dictates that the demand for electricity is lower on weekends because these are not working days.
It is during the week that there is a greater demand for electricity because people are in offices utilising appliances, and businesses are catering for the demands of such people.
So to have load-shedding on a weekend is a sure indicator that we are facing a bigger crisis than we want to admit.
Eskom has given the nation a bogus story about how Cyclone Idai that hit Mozambique and Zimbabwe, is the cause of the load-shedding crisis that we are experiencing.
The reality, however, is that we are only importing about 1,000MW of electricity from Mozambique and need about 30,000MW on any given day.
Breakdowns that are a result of ageing and faulty infrastructure account for almost half of the loss of the electricity.
So the truth is that Cyclone Idai is not the cause of our load-shedding crisis.
The cause is the huge cost overruns that we suffered in the construction of two multibillion-rand power stations – Kusile and Medupe, technical problems, poorly planned maintenance, breakdown of infrastructure and just as importantly, problems of leadership at Eskom.
What then of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Can we have the kind of technological leap that this revolution of complex cyber-physical systems demands if we are battling with elementary problems of powering the nation – problems that were resolved back in the 19th and early 20th centuries?
The answer to this is pretty obvious.
There is no reasonable way that SA can meaningfully participate in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the absence of strong and working institutions such as Eskom, which should be at the heart of industrialisation and the strengthening of manufacturing technologies.
Forget about the more nuanced issues around how the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a threat to the segmented and gendered labour market.
Forget about the inadequate penetration of the internet in our poor communities.
For now, let us focus on just electricity supply – a basic ingredient to the success of this revolution.
If we cannot get this one right, then we must necessarily ask: WHERE THE HELL IS THIS FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?
Load-shedding on a weekend is a sure indicator we are facing a bigger crisis than we want to admit