Load Shedding

Have you seen the 1995 post-apocalyptic movie Waterworld? What stayed with me most from that movie was the sense that the things we expect in our modern world could go away. The technology we expect could well not be there.

Do not call me a catastrophizer, but it was some little bit of that feeling of Waterworld I felt on learning of a current reality of South African society–load shedding.

As I understand it, there isn’t enough electricity to go around for everyone in the country, so every day there are planned times when the electricity is cut off.  For most people, it is cut off for a minimum of two hours a day. It could be cut off for much longer each day in some areas, and there is even an app to tell you when to expect the load shedding each day.

South Africa has been experiencing an electricity crisis since 2007, one that has had a big economic impact. From the little reading I’ve done about this, I don’t feel qualified to comment on the cause of this crisis or possibilities to solve it.

My anecdotal observations from talking with a number of guides in South Africa and fellow South African passengers is that it is causing plenty of people to be unhappy.

Just as an example, our guide for an excursion from the Mossel Bay, South Africa (April 7) was an older white man. He was very critical of most things about the current state of the country. Our guide attributed this to a corrupt and incompetent governing situation.  He said that some people are investing in solar power as a result of unpredictable power, which could be quite expensive. Unfortunately for the tourist industry, this kind of negative was the impression left on international tourists.

This got me curious about our guide’s perspective.  I asked about this in a later excursion to Krueger Park, and the load sharing process was confirmed as an issue.  The power did go out at the lodge, but they had installed generators, which kicked in after a period of time, and that was the way they managed the situation. They seemed to be taking it in stride.

This situation is not getting any better, and from what I can tell, there is no end in sight.

This controlled way of rotating available (and limited) energy among users is not unique to South Africa, and I found it done in Nepal and Bangladesh. Also, the idea that electricity supplies are not dependable is certainly not unique as power often does go out in many countries that have not yet developed a dependable infrastructure.

Yet, this one somehow got closer to home because I could imagine myself as one of those South African white people who were used to having dependable electricity and now felt like they had become part of the developing world in this regard. When you dig into it, it seems like this is an issue of privilege. The energy infrastructure was designed to provide modern levels of predictable energy for some of the South African people, but not built to provide energy for all the people in the apartheid times. Like climate change, seems like there was warning that this was coming, but that didn’t mean it got fixed.

I am left to ponder how we, in the United States, might learn from this. I am also quite sure that I’ve just scratched the surface and this is a complicated issue.