Johannesburg - With an eagle-eyed stare, Al’Louise van Deventer watches the numbers oscillate on an overhead cinema-sized screen, shielded by bulletproof glass. After all these years, she can tell almost instantly just how healthy the national electricity grid is.
Casually, she informs a colleague on the phone, yes, tonight South Africa is going to just make it – there won’t be any load shedding. But the system is going to be tight.
Here, at Eskom’s national control centre, hidden in Germiston on the East Rand, it’s been a quieter few days for its seasoned team of technicians and engineers.
There has been no load shedding over the past few days.
But Van Deventer, the cool head of the national control centre, knows this can change at any minute. Any second. “You can leave here thinking there’ll be no load shedding, but by the time you get back to your office, we are load shedding.”
Van Deventer is a slightly built woman with big power – the 41-year-old who decides when the country’s lights are switched on and off and how “deep” load shedding will be.
It’s the national control centre which instructs Eskom’s distribution regional control centres, municipalities and industrial clients on the megawatts that need to be shed.
The centre itself is a national key point – not even a recorder is allowed onto the premises.
The calm-looking team members clock 12-hour shifts inside a large circular vestibule of bulletproof glass.
That the hi-tech operation is safeguarded is especially important now with fears being spread of a national blackout, she offers.
“If there’s an emergency inside, we do have the functions to continue.”
The screen shows a snaking map of Eskom’s 359 337km of power lines, another showing the colour-coded health of Eskom’s fleet of power stations, and another box showing the power utility’s demand and generators.
But even in the worst grip of rolling blackouts, the word panic doesn’t exist in Van Deventer’s vocabulary. She prides herself on her thick skin and nerves of steel, built hard like Eskom’s transmission lines.
“My brain works logically. If I need to ask for a reduction, that is what I have to do.”
She takes no nonsense, even from her 2-year-old son, she smiles, unfazed even by the hate mail and derogatory comments on Eskom’s poor performance.
But she worries about the effect on her team. “That’s why we have sanity checks”, she jokes. “Every morning when I come in, I greet the team and check their eyes that they’re okay, especially when there’s been a lot of load shedding.
“Sometimes they have a hard time with their families and communities… It’s quite a big responsibility to carry the entire country on your shoulder,” she adds.
“Like the things people say on our Facebook page, or the Eskom selfie with two eyes in the dark. It can be demoralising. People think we’re a bunch of idiots with no clue and that’s why we’re load shedding.”
In fact, the opposite is true, she says. Like her, her team are veterans, some with 30 years of experience under their belt.
“They undergo rigorous training programmes. Our staff is very competent, exceptionally competent.”
And they are carefully screened to ensure they don’t panic in emergencies.
The sealed office where they operate is complete with a verdant forest of indoor plants and a gym as part of the company’s wellness programme.
For Van Deventer, who started out as a technician, her day starts at 4.30am, with her own trip to the gym. Within minutes, she is on the phone with her bosses and her team, a picture in her mind of the electricity generation and demand for the day.
“It’s a bit like weather forecasting,” she suggests.
Eskom runs 27 power stations with a total nominal capacity of nearly 42 000MW. Normally, the power utility relies on a reserve margin of a 2 000MW. But, as Eskom grapples with an ageing, collapsing fleet, and conducts maintenance, that reserve is buckling under the strain.
The grid’s frequency must be kept at a careful 50Hz. For Van Deventer, this is how she keeps her world – the balance between supply and demand – in equilibrium.
“I do feel there is pressure from the power system, all the volatilities, you know. It’s these ad hocs like if you lose an Apollo (power station).”
Load shedding is the only way to avoid a complete shutdown of the network. “If we cannot produce all the electricity we need, our only recourse is load shedding.
“It may not be comfortable for the consumer but have to do it. I understand their lives are disrupted, but we have to make sure we protect the total picture of the grid.”
If not, “everything will cascade completely out of control” and the country will shut down.
“People ask me about that all the time. No, it’s not going to happen. For us to get in a situation of total blackouts, for that to happen, we heed to have a major catastrophe. And there are barriers in place to protect us,” she assures.
And what does she do when the power goes out in her Germiston neighbourhood?
“It doesn’t bother me,” she shrugs. “Because I know it will come back. We play games, go for walks, or visit family. I’m amazed at how creative people can be.”
Saturday Star