ON THE MONEY
PETER ATTARD MONTALTO: Taking a calm stance in the face of the storm
Serious harm is being done to SA, and the government is wilfully ignoring it
It is quite something sitting in a boardroom in Sandton talking calmly about contingency planning for a blackout. People really struggle to deal with low-probability, high-impact events, but seem better at crisis planning.
In general, I think the risk of blackout was underestimated until about two to three months ago, and now is being overestimated by many. Eskom has a range of manual and automated emergency defence mechanisms (unused until now, and beyond normal load-shedding) which means that above stage 8 you don’t simply end up in a blackout. For a blackout to happen a lot needs to go wrong. But people still do underestimate the effect if it were to happen...
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