On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 3:08:38 AM UTC+2, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

I was on a Zoom chat with a bunch of fellow DBAs and one was from South
Africa and she was talking about an upcoming power outage because of the
factors you mention.

ESKOM has warned us all that 'Load-Shedding' (their euphamism for rolling blackouts / brownouts) is eminent this winter (we're in the Southern hemisphere), if all of us don't converse electricity. This is while, for the first time in history, the largest urban center of non-payment for electricity is actually under going ten hours a day blackouts due to maintenance and breakdowns. It is also occurring with-in weeks of two major metros announcing that if there is Load-shedding this winter they have made provision by installing hundreds of megawatts worth of diesel generators, that can running for days on end, and have secured enough diesel to run said generators at full capacity until summer.

Translation: those Metros are no longer prepared to have their citizens and the businesses that pay taxes to the Metro blackmailed. If ESKOM does something stupid the Metros are ready to go it alone under the single provision that the law makes for breaking the monopoly on power generation and distribution. Unfortunately I do not live within either of those Metros zones of control.

On the other side of things almost everyone who can afford it (I can't) has bought inverters, batteries, solar panels and / or generators. The generators suck because of the noise (I had a neighbor who had 3, including a 25kwe diesel. He wrapped them up in noise-absorbing boxes and filtered the exhaust fumes but it still felt and smelt like I was at ground zero of a post-apocalyptic dragster race). But those South Africans who can afford (who are hardly a majority) are making it clear that they don't intend to be under ESKOM's thumb this winter.

Another rush set of purchases has been gas (LPG in cylinders, almost nowhere in SA has piped gas) appliances. Gas cookers, stoves, space heaters, bath and shower water heater, fridges, and even LPG fueled generators are flying off the shelves so fast no one can keep their stock levels up. Unfortunately that party has a definite expiry date built in. SA single source of LPG is estimated to become non-profitable by 2023, which unless a pipeline from Mozambique finally gets finished will leave us without an affordable supply of LPG. We'll be back to buying it in tanker ships from the Middle East and the Americas. And the Green lobby, and some other people, are not too keen on the idea of having ships holding mega-liters of easily evaporating fuel parked off their pristine coastline. Given the safety record of some parts of the South African coast I'm not too happy about it either.



--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/



Anyway,

Take care.
Regards
Frank