‘It will be years, not weeks, before load shedding ends’

The end of load shedding is not mere weeks away, according to energy expert Chris Yelland, who says it will take years to stabilise the energy grid.

“It is not true that we are going to get back to normal in a couple of weeks, it will be a couple of years,” he said.

Yelland said South Africa would still have intermittent load shedding even after the current labour disputes were settled. “If we carry on like we have been carrying on, it will go on forever.

“We have had load shedding intermittently for the past 15 years. And nothing we have been doing has been working, so we need to do something different,” he said.

Yelland said the purpose of load shedding was to ensure the supply of electricity and the demand balanced. “If the electricity demand is 4,000 megawatts greater than the supply, you would have to implement stage 4 load shedding, which is 4,000 megawatts.”

He said Eskom only implemented load shedding to bring the supply and demand back in balance.

“When Eskom has to implement stage 6, it can’t switch off the whole country at once but rather switches off several areas that total to the 6,000 megawatts needed,” said Yelland. “After a certain time delay, they switch those areas back on and switch off another set of areas that total 6,000 megawatts.”

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Yelland said as the stages increased, Eskom had to switch off more frequently to get the same effect. “It doesn’t have to be two or two and a half hours. But it was decided as convenience of time that most people would be able to put up with load shedding.”

He said the higher the stage of load shedding, the more frequent it would be.

“Sometimes, there will be overlapping stages, especially going into stages 6 and 8, where we can expect four hours of load shedding. Four hours of load shedding at stretch is already difficult, but they only do that when they absolutely have to,” he said.

Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said load shedding came in all stages. He said each stage was 1,000 megawatts.

“That’s the amount of electricity that you are short of at that particular moment. Those stages are determined by the deficit at a particular point in time,” he said.

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The Democratic Alliance shadow minister for cooperative governance Kevin Mileham said several things had to happen if SA wanted to escape load shedding.

“Government needs to make it easier for independent power producers on a utility scale to access the market and make it less burdensome from a regulatory perspective for large-scale wind farms, solar farms and gas producers to enter the market independent from Eskom,” he said.

Mileham said government should also make it easier for homeowners and business owners to install small-scale embedded generation.

“That would go a long way in easing the demand on Eskom to allow them to do the necessary maintenance they must do to get the plant up and running again.”