OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Was sent this by a good friend of mine this AM. He was on the phone with his son, who indicated that he had to leave his apartment because there was a two hour planned power cut. This apparently happens twice a day. When asked why this was happening, he was linked to this story, which I just finished reading. This discusses the sequence of profit-driven momentously stupid decisions made that decimated the core generator fleet, resulting in soaring unreliability and tanking availability, all of which was completely avoidable. Compounded by meddling from two private consulting firms who slash-and-burned their way to their "cut" of temporarily increased profits, while leaving the utility even more destitute and in more dire condition than when they arrived.
The story leads early on with a statement claiming that, to counteract this precipitous decline, the utility has been ordered to invest in massive amounts of wind and solar, which will of course do nothing to solve the core issues with their baseload fleet, which will still be required to backstop that capacity, and be flexible in doing so.
There are certainly some parallels that could be drawn with PG&E in California, though they benefit from having a very wealthy ratepayer base, while Eskom's is steeped in poverty, so this very much becomes an exercise in trying to ring blood from a stone. It would seem that at the executive level, there is some form of contagious megalomania that overwhelms somebody once they are at the helm.
There are also some parallels that can be drawn between what happened in South Africa during the 90's and what happened globally, around that same time period. At this time, Eskom was the "top utility" in the world. Here in Ontario, Ontario Hydro was experiencing a similar exposure to politically-driven "slash-and-burn", formally called "soft path", ideology (which hinged somewhat on the conservation nonsense pushed by Lovins and company) that operated under the premise that these utilities were all grossly over-funded and that tremendous amounts of money could be saved by removing it from their budgets while offloading the responsibility for any sort of deficit to the population, who would be "encouraged" to conserve; to "save energy", which would also eliminate the requirement for investing in new capacity.
In Ontario, the immediate result of this was the massively declining performance of our nuclear fleet that resulted in 8 units getting laid-up, their output replaced by cheaper to run coal plants. Ultimately, Ontario Hydro would be broken-up with the intent of privatization, our largest nuke spun-off to a private company, and a generator fleet that took more than a decade to recover from this abuse.
Unfortunately, South Africa did not fare as well, and neither did California. We of course all remember the Enron scandal.
And there were casualties. SONGS would get shutdown in California, Pickering would lose units 2 and 3 here in Ontario.
Environmentalists at the time would use the results of this abject decimation to claim that these facilities were unreliable and call for more investment in wind and solar. This framing continues today in Australia with an aging and under-maintained coal fleet (as @Shannow can comment on) getting held up by VRE advocates as "proof" that coal is unreliable and they need to invest billions in renewables and transmission.
As we look for demand to markedly increase in the coming decade with the global push for electrification, I think it important to consider that Eksom's problems may be a harbinger for other grids/utilities who have under-invested in their core infrastructure, too busy chasing REC's and tokenism.
The story leads early on with a statement claiming that, to counteract this precipitous decline, the utility has been ordered to invest in massive amounts of wind and solar, which will of course do nothing to solve the core issues with their baseload fleet, which will still be required to backstop that capacity, and be flexible in doing so.
There are certainly some parallels that could be drawn with PG&E in California, though they benefit from having a very wealthy ratepayer base, while Eskom's is steeped in poverty, so this very much becomes an exercise in trying to ring blood from a stone. It would seem that at the executive level, there is some form of contagious megalomania that overwhelms somebody once they are at the helm.
There are also some parallels that can be drawn between what happened in South Africa during the 90's and what happened globally, around that same time period. At this time, Eskom was the "top utility" in the world. Here in Ontario, Ontario Hydro was experiencing a similar exposure to politically-driven "slash-and-burn", formally called "soft path", ideology (which hinged somewhat on the conservation nonsense pushed by Lovins and company) that operated under the premise that these utilities were all grossly over-funded and that tremendous amounts of money could be saved by removing it from their budgets while offloading the responsibility for any sort of deficit to the population, who would be "encouraged" to conserve; to "save energy", which would also eliminate the requirement for investing in new capacity.
In Ontario, the immediate result of this was the massively declining performance of our nuclear fleet that resulted in 8 units getting laid-up, their output replaced by cheaper to run coal plants. Ultimately, Ontario Hydro would be broken-up with the intent of privatization, our largest nuke spun-off to a private company, and a generator fleet that took more than a decade to recover from this abuse.
Unfortunately, South Africa did not fare as well, and neither did California. We of course all remember the Enron scandal.
And there were casualties. SONGS would get shutdown in California, Pickering would lose units 2 and 3 here in Ontario.
Environmentalists at the time would use the results of this abject decimation to claim that these facilities were unreliable and call for more investment in wind and solar. This framing continues today in Australia with an aging and under-maintained coal fleet (as @Shannow can comment on) getting held up by VRE advocates as "proof" that coal is unreliable and they need to invest billions in renewables and transmission.
As we look for demand to markedly increase in the coming decade with the global push for electrification, I think it important to consider that Eksom's problems may be a harbinger for other grids/utilities who have under-invested in their core infrastructure, too busy chasing REC's and tokenism.