88:88

An absolute treat for us Chez 6000 today, as we might be lucky enough to go the whole day without a power cut. But that’s more down to luck than anything else. The country is on Stage 3, which would generally mean about six hours off for most people. But in Cape Town, they’ve managed (for the moment) to reduce that to Stage 1:

The 180-megawatt Steenbras Hydro Pump Station (SHPS) consists of four turbines that are used to generate electricity. During peak electricity demand, it channels water from Upper Steenbras to Lower Steenbras, through the turbine generator, to create electricity.

When electricity usage is low, usually between 11pm and 7am, the turbines pump the water back to the Upper Steenbras Dam to be re-used the next day. In this way, SHPS operates like a battery. The amount of electricity that it can generate in one day is limited by the capacity of the lower reservoir.

Thus about two-thirds of the water used to generate power during the day is pumped back at night to the upper Steenbras reservoir to create more space for continual utilisation of the power station.

It’s more like charging the cellphone battery at night for usage during the following day. Cape Town is the only city in South Africa to own and operate a large pumped hydroelectric scheme. 

And then, thanks to the way that the timetable works, we have been fortunate enough to not be scheduled for any cuts in Stage 1 today.

Woohoo.

And there are rumours that Eskom has been saving up emergency reserve capacity over the past few day in order to give us relief from loadshedding for tomorrow as well:

Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer says that Eskom will do its best to keep the lights on for Christmas but warned that things could change very quickly.

“It is our intention not to have load shedding on Christmas Day; however, we are monitoring the situation,” he said.

The current outlook, barring any challenges over the next day or so, is that emergency reserves will have to be used to keep load shedding at bay. The intention is to keep load shedding suspended for at least ‘large parts’ of Christmas, he said.

Two days without blackouts. Aren’t we fortunate?

Look, I’ve taken the outrageously bold step of resetting all the clocks in the house. There’s no point in doing that usually, because they will all need resetting 4 hours later. But with (possibly) two days off, I’m going to indulge myself and be able to glance at the oven, bedroom clock or the microwave and get an accurate assessment of the time, rather than the usual 88:88.

I’m happy that we’re loadshedding free for these couple of days. It does help. But I’m also mindful that we need to avoid normalising this situation, or even celebrating it in some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome way. We shouldn’t have to be hoping to have electricity. It should be there.

But this situation isn’t going to change any time soon:

At least, not for the better…

ESP Screenshot

The go to app for all your loadshedding info has to be Eskom se poeEskom se PUSH, which will inform you exactly when your next slots of misery are due. Super useful, free (but therefore full of ads), and… well… it just works. There are, however, a couple of unnecessary embellishments, like their social media community chat thing, for example. This was probably added because everything needs to somehow be a social media community chat thing these days. That’s what the world seems to think, at least.

The trouble is that their social media community chat thing is not very well monitored, and this is South Africa, which makes it a hot bed of fake gnus…

…and often (not even) thinly veiled racism.

I don’t subscribe to the social media community chat thing because of these reasons, and because it’s actually of very little use, even when the comments aren’t lies or discrimination, but I still get a little snapshot each time I log on, presumably to try to encourage (?!?) me to get involved.
Stuff like this from “Bishop”:

Not a very ecclesiastical thing to say, Your Grace.

This was 17 hours ago, which means that Bishop has had at least three power cuts since it was written. One can only imagine the state of his diocese, given the promised loose stools which will presumably have repeatedly prevailed.

Eww. Messy. (And I don’t mean the overrated footy one.)

There is a serious side to this (other than the awful stuff that gets shared on their social media community chat thing), being that the reaction of the Bishop here is a snapshot all of us in SA right now: desperate, angry, overwhelmed, worried… and about to loose our shiit.
And while there is absolutely every justification for feeling this way, it achieves nothing at all, save for working us each towards an earlier grave. Sad.

Prefect end to the year

Last day of Term 4.
Therefore the last day of the 2022 school year.
The ceremonial switching off of the 6am alarm on the phone.
Prizegiving, and a goodbye to the headteacher of 19 years.
Some great results, and that prefect announcement.
Celebrating with a family meal out tonight (while our home sits in darkness).
And why not, given that there’s lots to celebrate and there’s the 2000-2230 slot for the next couple of evenings, and then an “are you actually f_____g kidding me” 1800-2230 on Sunday?

At least we won’t be able to watch Carte Blanche.

Why didn’t he ask before?

10 hours without power today. If only something could be done about it.

But… wait…

JUST IN: The Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, has directed the
management and board to work hard to get the country out of stage 6
loadshedding with immediate effect.

Oh. Well then.

I never realised it was that straightforward.

Why didn’t he just ask a bit earlier?

If you thought that today was bad…

…with its Stage 6 loadshedding and consequent 10 (TEN) hours without power – then you’d be absolutely right. Let’s not allow ourselves to normalise this sort of crap.

But then, if you’re in my zone, you probably don’t want to look at tomorrow, where there’s another ten hours, including the top two worst loadshedding slots.

Argh.

I saw someone the other day wondering when we would all start “posing the awkward question” (their words, not mine) as to why with so little electricity flowing on a daily basis, our bills haven’t dropped at all. Oooh! Tasty stuff, invoking all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Except…

Our bill has dropped loads. I buy the same amount of electricity every month and I usually/often (not sure which is the better word here) have to top it up by the end of the month. November’s lot is still going and we’re on the 7th December! And what’s more, we’ll make it to the 10th with what we’ve still got left (and well beyond, if we stick at Stage 6 for the next few days).

Some disclaimery:

  • Yes, I’d absolutely rather have power 24/7.
  • No, you don’t get completely free pass when the power goes out, because you need to heat water up and cool fridges down when it comes back on.
  • Yes, November is a warmer month, so there’s no heating required (such as we have heating anyway) and the ambient water temperature is warmer, so the same amount of electricity might go further.

    But still, even with those provisos in place, I’m getting at least 33% more than I usually do.

    And you have to take the small wins, because the big defeats are regular, they’re heavy and they’re depressing.

    Anyway, suddenly I have loads to fit in – including some depression – before the next outage at 2pm, so please excuse me.