A number of Southern African countries are in the midst of a devastating electricity crisis. Zimbabweans have been subjected to daily power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. In Zambia, load-shedding has just
. One of Africa’s largest power producers by installed capacity, South Africa is also experiencing electricity generation constraints mainly due to frequent breakdowns at its aging coal power plants. South Africa has an installed electricity generation capacity of over 50,000 MW, but quite often, close to 17,000 MW or even 24,000 MW at times is out of action due to a combination of breakdowns and planned maintenance.
Eskom’s load-shedding program is structured in stages, where Eskom sheds a certain quantum of load from the grid to stabilize the grid. So, depending on the severity of the crisis, load-shedding is implemented in stages from Stage 1 to Stage 8, where Stage 1 sheds 1,000 MW of load from the grid and in a Stage 8 scenario, Eskom takes out 8,000 MW of load from the grid. Load-shedding is implemented over 2-hour or 4-hour blocks on a rotational basis depending on the severity of the crises.
There is a popular independent load-shedding tracking app called “EskomSePush.” It has been tracking load-shedding for over 7 years now. Recently,created a historical calendar detailing every single day of load-shedding since 2015 using data extracted from EskomSePush. They say a picture says a thousand words, well this picture really shows the extent of South Africa’s electricity crisis and I can relate to the dates on that calendar. South Africa had its first real load-shedding period in 2007.
I was still at university at that time, finishing up writing my thesis. In my studies, I had to run experiments using vacuum annealing ovens. These experiments could run for 72 hours continuously. So, power cuts were simply not ideal. Thankfully, I had finished all the experiments by that time, and these were therefore not affected. 2016 and 2017 were generally good years as shown in Gareth’s chart, with no load-shedding whatsoever.
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