Be good and you'll see the light. This is the message from Eskom as Johannesburg rallied to the power utility's call to save electricity.
Because of this response there was no load-shedding in the city on Thursday morning, after three days of planned power cuts that hit parts of the Johannesburg.
But in the afternoon Eskom was forced to flick the switch again to stop a national collapse of the grid as power demand threatened the supply. Continues Below ↓
Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu said there would be enough electricity to meet the national demand if consumers used electricity sparingly and the cold, wet weather improved.
"If we save electricity throughout the day, we will most likely not have load shedding," said Zulu.
Mother Nature too is willing to lend a helping hand, According to the SA Weather Service, temperatures will rise at the weekend.
Zulu said five generator units had experienced technical problems on Monday and were being fixed.
"We have a number of units producing less than what they are capable of. This is because the coal in those power stations is wet.
"We are working around the alternatives. We have trucked coal into some of these stations; in other cases we have to dry it out," Zulu said.
From September to March every year, Eskom carries out maintenance as part of its preparations for winter, when the demand is generally higher.
In the past they have had enough power at any given time, with power stations on standby. If there were problems in one power station, they would simply increase the production of the stations on standby.
"Now we don't have high access capacity," Zulu said.
He added that it was an extraordinary situation to have 10 generators that were undergoing maintenance, five generators that were experiencing technical problems, plus the wet coal.
"We are finding ways of managing the wet coal problem. We have people who are paying particular attention to that," he said.
Zulu added that if there were areas without power early on Thursday, it could have been because of Wednesday night's load-shedding activities as some areas might not have fully recovered.
"We are busy assessing the situation to check whether there are areas without power, but we are not aware of any. We always minimise power failures and make sure that, during load-shedding, people are without power for a maximum of two-and-a half hours," he said.
"There may be one or two places that might not have power for the whole day because we are still clearing the faults that resulted from the load-shedding."
Asked why the load-shedding had taken so long, Zulu said: "It depends on how fast you improve the performance of the plant to alternatively reduce the demand. We could not do it as fast as we would have liked to.
"On Tuesday there was a slow response to the call to save electricity. Now the momentum is picking up and we are seeing the results."
Dr Steve Lennon, Eskom's managing director of corporate services, said South Africans should expect power cuts due to load shedding for at least the next six years.
He told Talk Radio 702 on Thursday that while Eskom was going ahead with plans to build coal and nuclear plants to help ease the power shortages, consumers could expect electricity disruptions until 2013.
This article was originally published on page 6 of The Star on October 12, 2007
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