Power outages and changing plans
By Laura
While our seminar in South Africa has left me with many insights on the outstanding impact that so many organizations are having – on diversity and inclusion, public health, job creation, and more – the story I keep returning to is what it felt like to realize I’d begun strategizing my life around power outages, and wondering at what point I would start saving for my own solar panels.
Since returning from South Africa, I keep thinking back to the few days after the seminar that I spent in Cape Town. I rented an Airbnb with three other classmates in Camps Bay, a seaside town near the base of Table Mountain. On our second night in the house, we lost power starting at 8:00 PM. After discovering our lighter was out of fluid and using the gas stove to light our candles – I’m still pretty proud of that – we settled in for what we hoped was a brief delay to our evening plans. For the first hour we assumed the lights would come back on at any minute. After the second hour, we grumbled about the inconvenience. We found a board game to play and chatted about classes for Mod 4. Without power we had no Wi-Fi, and without Wi-Fi we couldn’t call an Uber to get into downtown. Finally at 10:30 PM the power returned and we were able to reassess our plans.
Though we had studied the effects of load shedding – power outages due to the power utility Eskom’s lack of capacity to meet demand for electricity – we hadn’t experienced it directly while we were in Johannesburg. Sometimes traffic lights without power caused traffic issues, as our guide could attest to when she got caught in a jam for over two hours on her way to meet us one morning. However, we were staying in a hotel with backup generators, so we didn’t directly see the impact when other parts of the city lost power.
On our third afternoon in Cape Town, the power went out again at noon. We had already arranged for transportation for day’s activities, so the inconvenience was minimal. We learned that Eskom planned another blackout that evening at 8:00 PM. It happened while we were out for dinner, and we watched as some businesses came back online with backup generators while others relied on emergency lighting. When we returned to our house, we quickly set about lighting candles again to ride out the last hour of the outage.
We listened to the radio during our car rides when we were in Cape Town. Nearly every station touched on the load shedding, which had reached Stage 4. At this stage, Eskom sheds 4000 megawatts of the national load. The company tries to control where the outages occur to avoid a complete blackout. During our visit, part of the capacity issues came after the massive cyclone in Mozambique damaged the country’s power exports to South Africa. Radio DJs mused that the May elections might bring some change, while the guide on our wine tour blamed people who connected to the power grid without paying. The origins of Eskom’s issues are wide-ranging, and the proposed solutions come with their own challenges. The people in South Africa have seen significant price increases in the past several years, and since March 16 the power outages have increased significantly as well.
By our last day in Cape Town, we had begun strategizing around the predicted outages. We planned to leave the Airbnb with plenty of time before the likely outage at noon. We arranged to meet up at the waterfront because it was a major landmark that any taxi driver would know, so we wouldn’t need to worry about directions if we couldn’t hail an Uber. After spending the day exploring, we made sure to go out to dinner at a restaurant that we’d seen keep the lights on during the earlier outage so we could be certain that we’d have Wi-Fi to call our Uber to the airport.
What struck me the most was how quickly we began structuring our plans around the outages, and how difficult it was to be caught unprepared. For us, it was an inconvenience at most. It delayed our plans and left us without our typical leisure activities. But during a workday or an evening at home, it’s more than an inconvenience. My teachers didn’t use PowerPoints when I was in high school, but we still needed to have the lights on to see the board properly. Especially as more educational material involves digital content, teachers need power in their classrooms. I’m not entirely certain what I would have done all day in my last job without power; even our meeting agendas were in Google Drive. All of my cooking equipment is electric. Reading a book by candlelight sounds romantic until my eyes begin to tire.
Though I intellectually recognized the impact that access to power can have, actually experiencing load shedding in Cape Town emphasized its importance. While our seminar in South Africa has left me with many insights on the outstanding impact that so many organizations are having – on diversity and inclusion, public health, job creation, and more – the story I keep returning to is what it felt like to realize I’d begun strategizing my life around power outages, and wondering at what point I would start saving for my own solar panels. If I started thinking about that after four days, what does that mean for South Africa’s citizens, especially those who can’t afford to make investments in private infrastructure?
Experiencing load shedding reinforced to me the potential for impact in South Africa. One benefit of consistent access to power – apart from knowing that your medicines will be stored at the correct temperature, your computer will start up when you need to work, or your stove will cook your dinner – is the time saved not thinking about how to operate without electricity. I hope to that the South African government, Eskom, and whatever public-private partnerships develop in the coming years can give that time and certainty back to South Africa’s citizens.