Load-shedding spans three presidents, 14 CEOS
Load-shedding has spanned three presidents: Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa. Leadership insecurity at state-owned entity Eskom has not helped the situation. Fourteen people have held the position of Eskom CEO either on a permanent or interim basis since 2007.
Eskom’s history of load-shedding:
• In early 2007, the first incident of national load-shedding occurred due to the inability to meet demand with the operational generation capacity. In January 2008, there was almost daily load-shedding for two weeks, leading to a government declaration of a national power emergency on January 25 2008. Things improved from May 2008.
• In November 2014, a collapse of a coal storage silo at the Majuba power plant, which provides approximately 10% of South Africa’s electricity, saw the country plunged into darkness. In December that year the power utility started major stage 3 load-shedding.
• The 2014 power cuts spilled into 2015 where the power utility implemented more than 80 days of load-shedding (calculated on the hours of load-shedding in the year).
• In February 2019, Eskom implemented stage 4 load-shedding for the first time. That year alone, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) estimates that between R60-billion and R120-billion was wiped from the economy due to rolling blackouts.
• In December 2019 the country experienced its first episode of the dreaded stage 6 load-shedding, and in March 2020 Eskom implemented stage 4 loadshedding. It was around this time that Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer told the media the primary reason for load-shedding was due to a lack of maintenance and neglect over the preceding 12 years, which resulted in an unpredictable and unreliable system.
• Data from the CSIR shows that last year, load-shedding occurred for 1 169 hours, or 13% of the year.
• The move to stage 6 power cuts this week marked a serious regression, and the worst blackouts since 2019. On Friday, Eskom said it had already spent R4-billion on diesel to keep the lights on this year and avoid moving to higher stages of load-shedding – double what it had budgeted for the whole year.
Explainer: Stage 1 = 1 000MW; Stage 2 = 2 000MW; Stage 3 = 3 000MW; Stage 4 = 4000MW; Stage 5 = 5000MW; Stage 6 = 6000MW