Eskom's communications failure

Update 21st Jan '08. Go read the vintage Jon Qwelane column on the topic.

We're all into the foretaste of the powerless hell to come for the next decade. Courtesy of Thabo Mbeki's inability or unwillingness to listen when Eskom told his government that major forward planning, capex and construction was needed to meet the evolving power demand of South Africa.

The growth targets set by government cannot and will not be achieved without a regular supply of electricity. The lack of productivity, vehicle and generator fuel-wastage and overall national disruption being caused by the power cuts must be astronomical. Not to mention the carbon-footprint knock-on of the added congestion.

One tiny accounting firm of my acquaintance costs their losses at R 50 000 per hour when the power goes down. They simply can't afford at this point, the money required for a generator to keep their building going. I'm told that really big generators and the re-wiring required, can cost hundreds of millions of rands in, for example, a shopping mall.

My IT man lent me a generator last year when we sat for several days without power due to the aging JHB cable infrastructure. It gave us power, but the cost in fuel was breath-taking and the noise was fit to raise the dead. So even assuming that you have the money for a generator, what are your neighbours going to say about the resulting commotion?

Eskom (OK, it's NOT their fault that we sit with this situation) need to get their comms jacked up. One of their executives was explaining on radio that if you go to their website you can check when there'll be power outages in your area. [Gizmo in picture on left]. However, not quite true, for one simple reason. The head of City Power (I call them Johannesburg Disconnect) said that they sometimes have just thirty seconds in which to make a decision to shut down power to a particular area, before the whole grid goes down, if they don't.

So NOBODY knows when a squillion of us are going to put on our airconditioners or kettles all at the same time. Capish? But the Eskom website falls particularly flat on its pixels because:
1) There's a schedule for Monday, Wednesday and Friday cuts.
2) There's another schedule for the other days.
3) There's a stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3 consumption pattern on which the cuts depend. I'm terrible at math, but that's too many permutations, not including the uncontrollable variable of us switching on power-hungry appliances all at the same time - which nobody can predict. And although we know we householders are only responsible for about 6% of the total power demand, we're picking up the tab for heavy industry's guzzling of the increasingly scarce resource. So, the Eskom site is practically useless as a prediction mechanism.

Yesterday, for example, I spent my entire day caught in the most horrendous traffic jams courtesy of power cuts. You now have to leave hours before a meeting and sit in a coffee shop working on your notebook computer in order to be in the 'hood' of your next assignment. Crazy.

I may also now have to alter the Terms and Conditions of my consulting, to include a power-cut related disclaimer. I was working in Centurion earlier this week, doing media skills coaching. My thought was: 'What if the power goes down in the middle of our interview sessions? The camera can continue running on batteries, but nothing else will and we won't be able to do playbacks. Whose problem is that? Assume that this happens several times a month and the expectation is that I 'make-good' the disrupted session, I could land up doing more 'make-ups' (no no longer chargeable) than original work.' It's a scenario from Hades.

The terrifying thought is that each year, as urbanisation (just take Cosmo City as one example) accelerates and office complexes proliferate and infrastructural demand grows, the paucity of electrical power is going to have an increasingly negative knock-on effect. I believe this is something that should be declared a national emergency. Even the Public Protector, Lawrence Mushwana is now demanding some clarity. Go read The Times article on the topic.

When l lived and worked in the USA, there were bus-size generators brought into specific areas to provide power when there were problems. These are so big they can feed power back into the national grid. Why doesn't government consider an interim measure like that? And in the meantime, Eskom or JHB Disconnect, how about SMSs to notify us of impending outages or the duration thereof? In our modern world of comms, that shouldn't be too difficult or costly.
Clive Simpkins

Update 3rd February 2008
Densification in urban areas is creating a whole bunch of problems.