“Hello Darkness My Old Friend”

I suppose you can all recognise these opening words from the song by Simon and Garfunkel called The Sounds Of Silence. The context in which I am using them is about the situation all of us living in South Africa presently find ourselves. This is the phenomenon now called Load Shedding and is mainly due to poor maintenance of power stations, breakdowns and coal shortages.

For those of you who don’t know what this is I will explain briefly. At present here in South Africa the main supplier of electricity to the nation is Eskom (Electricity Supply Commission), incorporating fossil fuel power stations, hydro-electric schemes and one nuclear power station. Recently wind farms are steadily springing up as well as solar powered farms.

The problem now is that all these combined struggle to keep the lights on at peak times especially when even one power generator is down for maintenance! Hence we now have to endure load shedding. Depending on the severity of the problem the whole country has been divided up into stages, segments and times when the power is switched off – for 2 ½ hours at a time.

I have a special app on my phone called Grid Watch and I keep an eye on this every day for my area because Eskom can suddenly decide to implement load shedding at the drop of a hat so we must be ready with the gas stove or torches and candles in the case of night time! Some say we are going back into the Dark Ages!

Image Credit: Pixabay
© Peter Abrahamson