SIKONATHI MANTSHANTSHA: No load-shedding should worry you a great deal
What the absence of load-shedding this winter shows is that the economy is in much more serious trouble than we have cared to note
So winter is almost over and you haven’t had any load-shedding? And you think that means thing are going well? Think again. The fact that there’s no load-shedding should worry you a great deal. It doesn’t mean Eskom’s power stations have been fixed. Quite the contrary. It means the economy is in much worse shape than we all think. This is why.
When Eskom implemented stage 4 load-shedding in March, it did so because it could only meet about 80% of the demand for power. But that bout of load- shedding started on a Sunday, a summer day, when demand is at its lowest. Of its 45,000MW installed generation capacity, Eskom had only about 28,000MW available to meet demand of 32,000MW, due to the breakdown of equipment and a shortage of parts...
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