Imilender's tour in Sub-saharan africa

The big question on everyones lips at the moment is, how will this country cope with the load shedding. We had couple of quite days with no load shedding on Sunday and Monday, but after that they are back. Load shedding is a constant topic in the media at the moment. Last week the human rights council complaint that the poorer former black communities were more influenced by the cuts than the richer former white communities. It seems that as an outcome Escom has been scheduling more cuts to also our area. Yesterday we had cuts from 10-12, from 16-18 and even a short one at eight. This morning started with another cut at 6.30.

It seems that nobody is unaffected by the cuts. The rail company had couple of carriages burned down by angry commuters who got fed up when the train stopped for 2 hours due to load shedding. In Capetown hundreds of tourists were stuck hanging midair in cable cars as that area was under loadshedding. Even hospitals are having to postpone some non critical procedures as they cannot know if they operating rooms will loose power due to load shedding. Fortunately they do have generators so they can still manage the critical patients. The funny thing is that even the biggest mall (at least according to my guide book) in souther hemisphere, the Sandton City mall is affected by daily power cuts. The mall does have generator power to light up some lamps and operatate elavators, but all the shops are forced to close as there is not enough power for them. I personally ended up trying to sort out my banking there three times last week and each time it was affected by a power cut. It is weird walking in a large shopping mall that is almost dark. The hairdressers are still trying to accomodate their customers by pushing them into the mall's main passage ways and using the emergency lighting. :->

Traffic is getting really terrible as there are tens of major intersection without power. The traffic still flows, but it is a lot slower. Fortunately the Johannesburg metropolitan police promised to deploy police men to guide the traffic in the worst intersections.

The whole problem seems to be mainly caused by couple of factors. The first factor is that Eskom asked for funding to build new power stations over 10 years ago, but then the goverment had declined their pleas. They were hoping to have independent sector to build the stations. However the electricity price was (and still is) so low that there was no business case for independent sector. Eskom was just few years back given finance to build stations, but it takes several years to build a station. So there is no surplus at the moment. The second reason why this problem hit the country right now is that Eskom is doing routine maintenance during summer when the consumption has generally been the lowest. However as the economy has been booming for several years, nowdays there is a lot more airconditioning load than there used to be.

Well I got my inverter installed yesterday, so no we have light and power even during a blackout!