Our electricity came on last night for exactly 36 minutes and disappeared. The good news is it came on again sometime during the early hours as the water was hot for a decent shower this morning.
What happened was that the transformer was "floated" whatever that means and they started switching on suburbs one by one over the next two hours. At one point they had to stop as it was close to it's maximum capabilities already.The funny thing is I was watching this unfold on twitter and our area wasn't even on yet. I decided there and then that more petrol for the generator was required and couldn't rely on this lot.
Once we were up and running I had enough time to make a cup of coffee and schedule a post for today before everything went dark again. It was kind of expected and on the cards as one of the cables caught fire due to the overload. When 4 out of 8 areas are running and there are already concerns you don't hold much hope.
When looking at their twitter site I noticed how many problems they are currently facing. Yes we are going through a cold front currently so the temperatures are quite a bit cooler than normal but still. Some areas have been out for over a week due to blown transformers. With lack of information coming back saying it was imminent and then hours of nothing certain residents went down and camped at the sub station to update everyone on the progress. Quite scary thinking that we all rely on this and some for their livelihood these days working from home.
This tells me the infrastructure cannot cope with it's workload and the entire sub stations around the country need to be over hauled. In Johannesburg last night there were at least 12 outages involving multiple suburbs. This meant that nearly half of Johannesburg over the last week has experienced electricity outages due to failing infrastructure.
Our electricity is not cheap and one of the most expensive in the world yet they haven't upgraded their systems. The staff wages rise at an escalating rate each year along with the costs handed over to the public who are being short changed by lack of service.
What I don't understand is how they think that this is good business? We are lucky along with many in our road who have generators but the majority of people don't. The cost vs solar has been raised again and it is now in the fore front of most thinking it is about time to pull the plug.
Electricity costs have only kept rising over the last 10 years with increments of between 10-20 percent year on year. I think we are close to the threshold where your electricity bill will cover any installments for a unit that will take you permanently off the grid. I have spoken abut this before but after what we are seeing now is not a bad time to look into it again. I expect the prices to drop since the last time I had looked but maybe not so as our currency has weakened so it will be a good insight and exercise anyway to just look.
