The warning was as sudden as it was shocking. “We regret and
sincerely apologise that stage 4 load shedding will move to Stage 6 load
shedding as from 18:00 today, as a result of a shortage of capacity,” South
Africa’s national electric utility Eskom announced via social media late one Monday
afternoon last month. The cause:
damage to infrastructure and coal supplies from heavy rains and flooding in
parts of the country. With that, South Africans were given twenty minutes’
notice that Eskom was turning off the lights on more than a third of the
country for the indefinite future. Residents, companies, and even municipal utilities for large cities such as
Johannesburg were left scrambling to prepare and locate undisclosed
schedules for when their areas would experience outages. And, predictably,
people took to Twitter to vent their frustration—often, as is the case here in
South Africa, through gallows humor.
— Godrich Gardee (@GardeeGodrich) December 9, 2019
The cascading effects of a major power shortage were made
obvious immediately after Eskom’s announcement. The major telecommunications
company Vodacom notified the public that the batteries backing
up its cell phone towers might not bridge the gap between load shedding events
at a Stage 6 level, potentially leaving people without their primary means of
communicating and obtaining information. The byzantine nature of Eskom’s scheduled outages prompted news outlets and app developers to produce their own maps and
features to help people figure out how long they would be in the dark.
Here in the City of Cape Town, where I reside and which is recovering from a historic drought, City
officials warned that the outages could affect the
metropolitan water supply. Portions of the city’s water system were in fact
shut down for hours just as people started fixing dinner, as I later heard from
a friend in another part of the city with firsthand experience.
Eskom, a massive South African state-owned enterprise,
implements intentional rolling power outages, known as load shedding, as a
precautionary measure when it determines that demand will outstrip supply,
thereby avoiding an overdraw on system capacity that would trigger an unplanned
total power failure of the national grid, a calamity that it says would take weeks to rectify. The unique nature of
electrical power grids necessitates a minute-by-minute, country-wide assessment
of the balance between power generation and largely predictable swings in
consumption, which are dictated by the rhythms of daily life. It is an
admittedly delicate dance that necessitates quick reactions. Hence the
laughably short warning provided to the public last month.
Load shedding has become a burdensome, if occasional, part
of life for South Africans over the past decade. However, December’s Stage 6
event was unprecedented in scale and duration, resulting
in large swaths of the country experiencing no power for much of a night.
Designated load shedding levels beyond Stage 4 hadn’t even been discussed
publicly until earlier this year. Stage 8, theoretically the
highest and most painful level provided for, would result in half of the
country being without power, although some experts say that full system failure could
occur even before Stage 8 is reached.
Foremost in the minds of many South Africans is the impact
on the economy and livelihoods. South Africa’s economy, the second largest in
Africa, has been wobbly over the past several years, hampered by security
issues, high income inequality, and corruption. Its electricity woes are not
helping. The World Economic Forum has
noted the country’s inefficient electricity supply as a challenge to its
economy. Load shedding brings an acute dimension to this shortcoming. Altogether,
estimates of the impact of load shedding events on South
Africa’s economy put the cost in the tens of billions of Rands
(billions of U.S. dollars) last year.
In order to get a better sense of the economic impact at the
ground level, I got in touch with Paul Rubin, the owner of a local organic bulk foods grocery that I shop at in Cape
Town’s City Bowl. When I asked him if he had a minute to share his experience with
load shedding as a business owner, he asked if I had an hour. Rubin called the
effects of the load shedding crippling, particularly for local stores like his.
While a grocery might not strike someone as the most electricity-dependent
enterprise, an outage can affect critical elements such a refrigeration and
payment systems. “There’s no warning. It
just starts… and it’s a mad scurry to try and survive.” Another local business manager
I spoke with echoed Rubin’s sentiment.
The toll is not just economic, but also social and even
psychological. Hospitals, schools, and libraries all may be drastically
impacted. Traffic lights and streetlamps darken, impacting safety and security.
People look on with dread as their cell phone batteries drain down. The modern
city and modern life, fueled by electricity, can feel isolating and hostile without
it.
The perils of infrastructure failure are distributed
unequally in an unequal society. South Africa, you may have heard, has an
economic inequality problem. It is in the unenviable position of being world’s reigning
Gini
Coefficient champion (a common measure inequality). As with other types of
infrastructure and public service delivery, the burden of Eskom’s power cuts is
borne disproportionately by South Africa’s poor. Larger companies and those
living in upscale apartments or in households that can afford diesel generators
or solar panels are able to ride out load shedding, albeit with an impact on
their wallets. South Africa’s impoverished communities, which were poorly
served as a point of policy under the Apartheid era, are now facing power cuts
without the resources to mitigate the impacts. Inequality is now enforced by
the market as well as the grid.
Eskom’s December foray into uncharted territory was short
lived. By the next day, Eskom had reduced the load shedding schedule to Stage
4, and it kept it at a now tame-seeming Stage 2 for most of the remaining week
before returning to normal by the weekend. However, industry and official forecasts
predict that load shedding will continue to occur for the foreseeable
future. As predicted, the country has continued to experience load shedding
events, including for much of early January.
In today’s society, where electricity literally powers our
way of life, the suddenness of load shedding is more than an inconvenience. Power
outages have real consequences on people’s livelihoods, well-being, health, and
safety, and their increased frequency and intensity suggests dramatic changes
are needed. In order to get there, South Africans need to heed the wake-up call
and learn what we can from the past in order to change course. It’s time to stop
planning for failure, and instead start planning for the future.
Up next: Part 2, Circuit Overload.
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