This message was 10 hours after the power went off
The urgency is the problem as there is none and we are working on African time which means you need patience and a very thick skin.
Yesterday we had a day from hell with regard to electricity supply and why every time we have load shedding I get nervous because it is not the turning off but the turning back on that is the problem. If you are turning on and off substations twice every day something will inevitably go wrong somewhere.
On Saturday night at midnight the neighboring areas substation blew and ours followed shortly after at 9am the next morning. The fault would be reported by residents in the area and subsequently you would bet notification on social media with regards to updates. Rather simple and an effective way of communicating these days keeping everyone in the loop who is affected.
As per normal I turned on the generator thinking it would be a quick fix not expecting that the turning on would still be nearly 12 hours away. The notifications regarding updates was not forthcoming besides the message a team had been dispatched to check what the fault was. Worryingly at 6pm the notification reported the fault was being turned over to the night shift as the other team had been busy with the previous fault which they had just completed after they had been down for 18 hours. This meant that for the 9 hours we had been without power no one had investigated the cause of our outage.
These are government run companies and not privatized enterprises and why there is no services being offered. In our area or region we had one team out on call to fix any problems that might arise and a private company would see that as lost earnings. An entire region not using their services for that length of time is removing revenue they could be earning and a government department never thinks like that.
When we start to count the downtime due to faults it becomes rather obvious very quickly that millions are being lost not only in revenue to the SOE, but also businesses in those areas affected. The 13 or so hours I was sitting with no power may have cost me $30 in fuel to run the generator, but at the same time I was not paying for electricity from the supplier.
This is not a once off experience as over the last two weeks since load shedding started up again this is the third time we have been off due to substation failures. The more this happens and it is regular these days the more homes and businesses are switching to alternative supply like Solar.
It is reported that more than 50% of electricity is being stolen through illegal connections and why Eskom wants to charge households who are even off the grid nearly $60 monthly. They are concerned that as more people become self sufficient the revenue will drop off even more leaving only non payers. This will happen within the next 20 years and is a ticking time bomb which there is no coming back from. You can push your customer base so far to the point and then they are gone for good.
