ANC slowly digging its own grave through load shedding

Like clockwork on Tuesday – a day after the municipal elections – Eskom announced stage 2 load shedding would be implemented overnight, from 4pm until 5am on Wednesday, as power constraints persisted.

Political economy analyst Daniel Silke said the load shedding situation before the elections had contributed substantially to the poor results of the ANC.

“If the electricity grid continues to degrade, as it seems to be without any relief, the issue is going to become a further drain on ANC support moving to 2024, since we have all been warned that we will have load shedding for some time to come.

“If anything, the ANC will dig its own grave politically on the issue of load shedding because it is the most inyour-face example of the failure of a state agency,” he said.

According to the power utility, the constraints were expected to continue throughout the week.

ALSO READ: Polls closed, darkness returns: Eskom warns of load shedding ‘at short notice’

“This afternoon a generation unit at Kusile power station tripped, adding to the constraints,” an Eskom statement said on Tuesday.

“A unit each at Matimba and Arnot power stations failed to return to service as previously anticipated.

“These constraints are expected to persist for the rest of the week, which may require the load shedding to be extended.

“We are currently utilising emergency generation reserves extensively to supplement supply.”

Energy analyst Clyde Mallinson said the power utility had storage pumps in various parts of the country which assisted in making sure the country had power.

“Eskom has what are called pump storage assets which pump water from the top of the hill at Drakensburg and Cape Town, where they collectively produce about 2 700 megawatts (MW) when they are in generation mode.

“Collectively, they have about 3 000MW in cycle gas turbines, although they are called open gas turbines [and] they currently run on diesel,” he noted.

Mallinson added recent load shedding before Monday was to ensure the country had sufficient power on voting day.

“We recently had stage 2 and 4 and that period was used to make sure the dams and diesel tanks were full so they could ‘run these things as large as we need to’, to have electricity on election day.

“What that means is the system is short of output from the coal fleet,” he said.

– asandam@citizen.co.za