[zx76]

This is correct.

Due to how long these power cuts have persisted a lot of businesses, industry and the middle class & up have almost habituated to the levels up to 4. Shopping centers have generators, business parks have full solar and retail stores have battery backup. For instance a local clothing chain (Foschini) installed 300+ Tesla powerwall setups so that all their locations can be totally uninterrupted even with 2.5/5/7.5 hours per day of power cuts. Cell towers, fiber infrastructure, hospitals, even traffic lights at busy intersections all have battery backup these days.

The reason this announcement is making the news is because levels above 4, like the two weeks or so of stage 6 we recently had are much more problematic. You start to run into issues where cell tower batteries can only charge like 80% back up with the number of hours powered per day - and so after a few days they no longer have enough charge to keep up with the interruptions and go offline, disrupting communications & internet access.

Additionally the provisions heavy industry has made over the years to deal with this become insufficient and you start to lose shifts and thus there's a lot of evidence the economy is very materially affected at these levels of cuts.

Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor and disrupts job growth when it's desperately needed, curtails foreign and local investment etc. To discuss how parts of society can easily function with the lower stages of power cuts is not to miss how insane this all is... A society of 60 million people has largely stood by while this has happened for approx. 15 years now. And it's not like this is a matter of a poor nation without the ability to invest - approximately $40 billion USD has been spent by the power utility just in capex alone in this period - and afterwards they are producing less power than at the start... Quote from a local article: "It means that Eskom destroyed 46 GWh of power generation per R1 billion spent on increasing its power generation." [1]

[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/465641-eskom-blew-r...

[lelanthran]

> Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor

Yes, the poor shoulders this crisis more than the minority non-poor. But, it is in their power to fix it, because it's the masses of poor that have been voting the same government into power repeatedly for almost 30 years.

What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights? They vote for more poverty every single time, and there's nothing anyone can do to get them to change there minds.

[avar]

    > What would you have us do? Revoke their voting rights?

This is easy to say as a non-South African, but the results of your elections seem to be highly regional[1], especially around Cape Town v.s. the rest of the country. If you then compare that to South African power stations[2] you can see that they're clustered around high population regions.

Then you have the SAPP[3] where nations in Southern Africa have interconnected grids. E.g. Namibia[4] is impacted by South Africa's blackouts, but not to the point of their own supply shortages mirroring Eskom's outages, and they're planning to become independent.

So if a country of 2.5 million to your north can run their own semi-connected grid, can't parts of South Africa form their own local experiments in grid management using their own tax base?

I've got no idea how hard that would be to pull off politically, but presumably easier than "convince the entire country not to vote for the ANC", or "full independence for the Cape" etc. We're only talking about energy infrastructure.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_South_African_general_ele...

2. https://osm4wiki.toolforge.org/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?proj...

3. https://www.sapp.co.zw/

4. https://www.observer24.com.na/load-shedding-in-sa-lowers-nam...

[abenga]

What would you have them do? Vote for the party that treated them as third-class citizens for decades?

[lelanthran]

> What would you have them do? Vote for the party that treated them as third-class citizens for decades?

Strawman, the options are not "apartheid or corruption", because the party that treated them as third-class citizens doesn't exist anymore.

You're presenting a false equivalence here, but I'm not sure what point your dishonesty is supposed to make.

[abenga]

Just because the name of a party changed doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more.

[jasonhansel]

I'm assuming that the need to recharge all those batteries means that, when the power gets turned back on, usage spikes very rapidly, making the problem worse.

Since those batteries aren't 100% efficient, a fair amount of this power is probably being lost to the batteries themselves.

[zx76]

Absolutely. That said, the bigger effect is actually from geysers since almost every house has one whereas batteries are not as widely spread. As the power comes back on the geyser will suddenly draw substantially since the temp will have fallen during the scheduled cut.

Accordingly there have been big govt. subsidies for geyser timers to put on your DB and solar geysers to try reduce this effect. Big information campaigns about not running the geyser all the time etc.

The consequences can be substantial, the city electricity depts. have to continually deal with substations and local transformers blowing up (literally, in an explosion, I've seen the aftermath!) because of the demand surges. Some areas are exempted from the scheduled cuts in my city to preserve older infrastructure.

Additionally, insurance companies report big spikes in claims from devices being damaged due to the unstable power as it reconnects. In my house everything is behind varying levels of surge protection, and interestingly I actually have SA made surge plugs that don't pass power through for the first 5 minutes after powering back on. This way my fridge compressor won't be damaged by unstable power (e.g. sudden substantially lower voltage, or a surge) as the scheduled cut ends.

[lbotos]

I think "geysers" are a type of hot water heater, yes?

[zx76]

Yes. Most houses in SA have electrically heated water stored in a tank called a geyser. There are other options - some apartment complexes have central heat pump hot water, some houses have on demand heating via gas - but the most common is something like a 100/150/200 litre insulated steel tank in the roof that stores hot water and regulates it to 60 degrees C via thermostat.

[lgleason]

It's what us American's call a hot water tank. Basically the same thing.

[x0x0]

From that article (which is astonishing):

> Between 2007 and 2021, Eskom invested R680 billion to increase its generation capacity. However, after this huge investment, Eskom produced less power than when it started.

The power plants started in 2007 with initial budgets of R79 billion and R81 billion and were due to be completed in 2012 and 2014. Neither are fully operational, produce far less than the design capacity of 4800MW, have significantly overrun their budgets (R145 B and R161 B respectively), and require another R33 B to finish! Is this all corruption or ???

edit: Here's another article: https://archive.ph/LctJi . tl;dr: mismanagement, corruption, and a very long history of pricing power below cost and borrowing to cover. Plus handouts to inefficient coal suppliers creating that bad cost structure that wasn't passed on to buyers.

[eikenberry]

If they already have the infrastructure they should just skip ahead to 100% solar/wind power with no base load infrastructure. Storage/batteries at the endpoints makes base load redundant and wasteful.

[klipt]

Yeah all that batteries do is time-shift power usage. If there's an overall shortfall of power generation, batteries don't really help on a systemic level.

And every little business having its own diesel generator is just like building more power stations, but much dirtier and less efficient...

[zx76]

Exactly. I've had conversations with friends about how much less effective load shedding must be now compared to when it started because of the proliferation of battery backup. At the beginning, an two hour cut would have reduced total GWh used substantially. But now, as soon as the cut ends demand will spike as batteries charge. Without data on just how many batteries there are it's hard to work out at what point an additional hours cut will be required!

Of course it's not the biggest crisis because grid-level electricity usage spikes overwhelmingly at morning and evening peaks. So if you can use the power cut schedules to shift demand away from these peaks, even if the batteries reduce the efficiency a bit, you're still having a substantial effect on the required peak grid power.

[zx76]

The problem is that not everyone can afford battery backup, due to the poverty in our society the country basically has to have a reliable base load. Coming from the sections of society where everyone has solar, inverters, datacenter style lipo UPS in their houses etc. it's also been interesting to me how inefficient storage at the endpoint is. People are spending R300k ($17k) on batteries and inverters sized to their houses' peak load, but 90% of the time they could actually get by with radically less. I read on HN about a company making a smart Distribution Board for houses - seemed like a really good idea based on this. If you can intelligently manage load you can cut your off grid setup cost substantially at minimal inconvenience.

[x0x0]

This whole thing sounds like an astounding market failure. Many can buy their way around society's inability to deliver (even quasi-) reliable electricity, but just wow.