A fresh logical discussion about Eskom

Nerfherder said:
I'm halfway though but they cover a broad range of things. The general sentiment is that mistakes were made but Eskom can be fixed and its more the private sector that is artificially causing LS so that the entire power supply chain can be privatized.
They say a lot of contradictory things but I i'm interested in that narrative because when you find yourself in a situation where you only have one option, it means that you have been pushed there.

The most problematic thing said here is that the Karpowerships have been getting unnecessary negative attention in the media, but then moments later they say that if we had 18 months we could fix all the problems with the existing infrastructure and "catch up". They skip over the fact that its a 20 year contract that will cripple us.
This leads me to believe that these guys are ANC apologists - which is fine because we never hear that side of the story. Its just good to know that upfront.
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Eskom can be fixed in a single day actually. All they have to do is make the tenders transparent. Put it on a website and let the people see who is getting what and for what purpose. Then people can object to unlawful and corrupt contracts long before auditors will look at it.
 
Romy_ said:
Eskom can be fixed in a single day actually. All they have to do is make the tenders transparent. Put it on a website and let the people see who is getting what and for what purpose. Then people can object to unlawful and corrupt contracts long before auditors will look at it.
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and burn all the coal trucks.
 
They make some good points, while skirting a lot of the real issues. Stuff I liked:
Nats spent 16% of GDP on infrastructure. ANC is spending 1%. Called it as it is
Gas options are the fastest base load additions we can get online. Agreed 100%
The off camera guy liked more government departments, and disliked private. The guy in the white shirt was spot on on saying it was not working due to no single point of accountability and said we should consolidate.

The Guy in the white shirt was very good, not so much the university guy or the off camera guy. University guy shifted blame away from government and Eskom onto NGO's, Sneaky private providers who are now trying to fleece government, etc. Just wrong. Also saying private is incapable of solving this it can only be Eskom. What a joke. He is being proven wrong as we speak.

Mostly I think they completely missed the key important facts on how we got here. The ANC ignored the projections for too long. When they started taking action they did the following:
They put Eskom in charge of commissioning private providers. This was idiotic as Eskom did not want to bring in competitors to themselves obviously and blocked it at every turn. Its like asking someone to hire their own replacement. Idiotic.
The ANC claims private was supposed to full the gap but legislation has always blocked that up until very recently and its still not completely unwound. By law private production over 1MW was illegal. So Private was never an option thanks to ANC. That was not mentioned once.

Lastly not one of them spoke about the headcount problem. Eskom is overstaffed. They have more salary bill and headcount for every MW generated than just about any other energy company in the world. Its crazy. They completely missed that. Solving the problem has to involve rightsizing headcount and skills and all they said was we need to protect jobs. They aluded to this with the 1% vs 16% comment but missed the boat in the end. This is not just an issue at Eskom, its in every government department. Its common knowledge after many many studies that there is an ideal ratio for government spend between headcount and material/infrastructure costs. We have almost no money left to buy actual infrastructure and tools as we have too much headcount absorbing all the money.

The ANC ideology is so steeped in trade union and commie logic they cannot ever downsize and disrespect the private sector for doing the necessary right sizing. Anyways, the real reason we have load shedding is as always, the ANC. They never make that clear, and for at least some of those panelists they are clearly singing from the ANC hymn sheet where private sector = evil, and the poor ANC is not at fault for all of this. One guy even blamed De Ruyter for units being down due to him removing the budget to run them. If that where true believe me the proof would have been published a long time ago by Gordan. Laughable.
 
Romy_ said:
South Africa used to be at the nuclear innovation forefront. Remember we have been enriching uranium before the Americans did. I see no reason why we can't develop our own. We have all the materials we need right here in South Africa. But again even innovation is linked to governance. But it can do a lot of good if we can.
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Blame Jimmy Carter... the same reason why Nuclear FUD exists and most of the world abandoned recycling.

Atom bombs

3. THE CARTER POLICY

On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead.

President Carter's Executive Order also announced that the U. S. would sponsor an international examination of alternative fuel cycles, seeking to identify approaches which would allow nuclear power to continue without adding to the risk of nuclear proliferation. More than thirty nations participated over almost three years. But no new magic answer could be found.

Some other nations went ahead with reprocessing and breeder development, but high costs and loss of political support delayed plans in many nuclear projects around the world. The U. S. never regained its technological lead in nuclear energy development, its own nuclear power program had already gone from orders to cancellations, and the dream of long-term future energy security from breeder reactors faded away. The three years of uncertainty about the future had wiped away further prospects for private investments in the nuclear fuel cycle. Today, twenty years later, all U.S. spent fuel remains in storage at each plant where it was used.
Click to expand...
Source
 
private sector != evil. Truth is and this is a truth if you look at Eskom's internal structure and accountability systems. Not a single thing will work. I cannot tell you how many times I was asked to go with the safety officer to go find people that were sleeping all over the area. They are supposed to work at night but they don't.

They get very creative with their beds made from cloth and whatever. Why is this a problem? See they are all locked in on a permit and that thing cannot be cleared if they are not all accounted for. It is hours of BS and no work being done.

I have to say this is where labour broking held its own for a while. Then unions got involved. Everyone became untouchable and that was a HUGE problem because it can take anything from 6 months to a year to fire someone. I can't confirm this but one of the people that was responsible for losing the generator at Duvha power station only had to go for retraining in the end. Still employed to this day I am told but again I cannot confirm this.
 
Allegedly the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor got very far in the development cycle but had an expectation management problem. I have heard that TPTB thought they were getting a functional reactor (as in something that could be connected to the grid), but were confused when a demo prototype was shown. I don't know exactly how apocryphal that is, but it came from someone connected to the project. Funding would have been needed to scale the tech up. That or any of the newer "passively safe" reactors should be part of the mix.
 
Cius said:
The Guy in the white shirt was very good, not so much the university guy or the off camera guy. University guy shifted blame away from government and Eskom onto NGO's, Sneaky private providers who are now trying to fleece government, etc. Just wrong. Also saying private is incapable of solving this it can only be Eskom. What a joke. He is being proven wrong as we speak.
Click to expand...
University guy is an idiot. He thinks the greenhouse effect of CO2 is from the exothermic reaction of oxidation. No-one asked him to explain the greenhouse effect, it wasn't relevant to the discussion, but he still explains it and gets it wrong.

I enjoyed listening to the off-camera guy for his perspective, but I can't help but note that he simultaneously doesn't want privatisation, but does want an 18-month contract with Kapowership, a private company.
 
Cius said:
They make some good points, while skirting a lot of the real issues. Stuff I liked:
Nats spent 16% of GDP on infrastructure. ANC is spending 1%. Called it as it is
Gas options are the fastest base load additions we can get online. Agreed 100%
The off camera guy liked more government departments, and disliked private. The guy in the white shirt was spot on on saying it was not working due to no single point of accountability and said we should consolidate.

The Guy in the white shirt was very good, not so much the university guy or the off camera guy. University guy shifted blame away from government and Eskom onto NGO's, Sneaky private providers who are now trying to fleece government, etc. Just wrong. Also saying private is incapable of solving this it can only be Eskom. What a joke. He is being proven wrong as we speak.

Mostly I think they completely missed the key important facts on how we got here. The ANC ignored the projections for too long. When they started taking action they did the following:
They put Eskom in charge of commissioning private providers. This was idiotic as Eskom did not want to bring in competitors to themselves obviously and blocked it at every turn. Its like asking someone to hire their own replacement. Idiotic.
The ANC claims private was supposed to full the gap but legislation has always blocked that up until very recently and its still not completely unwound. By law private production over 1MW was illegal. So Private was never an option thanks to ANC. That was not mentioned once.

Lastly not one of them spoke about the headcount problem. Eskom is overstaffed. They have more salary bill and headcount for every MW generated than just about any other energy company in the world. Its crazy. They completely missed that. Solving the problem has to involve rightsizing headcount and skills and all they said was we need to protect jobs. They aluded to this with the 1% vs 16% comment but missed the boat in the end. This is not just an issue at Eskom, its in every government department. Its common knowledge after many many studies that there is an ideal ratio for government spend between headcount and material/infrastructure costs. We have almost no money left to buy actual infrastructure and tools as we have too much headcount absorbing all the money.

The ANC ideology is so steeped in trade union and commie logic they cannot ever downsize and disrespect the private sector for doing the necessary right sizing. Anyways, the real reason we have load shedding is as always, the ANC. They never make that clear, and for at least some of those panelists they are clearly singing from the ANC hymn sheet where private sector = evil, and the poor ANC is not at fault for all of this. One guy even blamed De Ruyter for units being down due to him removing the budget to run them. If that where true believe me the proof would have been published a long time ago by Gordan. Laughable.
Click to expand...
It was good to hear their perspectives but they glossed over a lot of hard issues. Why couldn't they be honest and say economic transformation was problem here. They lay blame on Mbeki and Zuma but never once mention the ANC.

Some good points they made :
  • The Nats never planned for black people to have electricity.
  • Business does not always have the best intentions for the people of South Africa
  • Renewables will only get us so far (in the short term)
 
DUDE!@##$%% said:
We can all identify and see the problems at Eskom

But as others have mentioned, the ANC is in the way of any solution. They have to go first, its really that simple
Click to expand...
Honestly, the DA isn't much better. They will also use Eskom as a cash cow. Just remember that the DA support the same employment model the ANC does. They say equal this and equal that, but to win over the majority vote they did stipulate that the amended labour laws are here to stay.

Politics are filled with special people that want to be wealthy famous and not work for a living. Their goal is empty promises.

Let us focus on Eskom, it will take 3 years per boiler to rebuild it. That is 3 years per unit for every unit. Consider the state of disrepair and the availability of parts. You are looking at a 3 to 5-year outage per unit. Most power stations had little or no repair work. So changes that entire power stations will be off for a minimum of 5 years is very possible. How many power stations can we be without?

Also, consider that we are currently generating 22 GWh to 23 GWh with level 4 to 6 load shedding. Not to mention the safety margin.

In short, we have no solution, unless Russia or America are willing to build power stations on our behalf. But not even they will be able to keep corruption out as they will be forced to make use of local skills. That is a big problem.

An example is Elon Musk with Starlink. They want half of Starlink! I mean WTF.
 
3WA said:
University guy is an idiot. He thinks the greenhouse effect of CO2 is from the exothermic reaction of oxidation. No-one asked him to explain the greenhouse effect, it wasn't relevant to the discussion, but he still explains it and gets it wrong.

I enjoyed listening to the off-camera guy for his perspective, but I can't help but note that he simultaneously doesn't want privatisation, but does want an 18-month contract with Kapowership, a private company.
Click to expand...
Ya, I struggled with this the most. Either we are misjudging the deal or he is a BS artist.

There is no 18 month option for the Karpowership - this is the problem.
 
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Nerfherder said:
It was good to hear their perspectives but they glossed over a lot of hard issues. Why couldn't they be honest and say economic transformation was problem here. They lay blame on Mbeki and Zuma but never once mention the ANC.

Some good points they made :
  • The Nats never planned for black people to have electricity.
  • Business does not always have the best intentions for the people of South Africa
  • Renewables will only get us so far (in the short term)
Click to expand...

Interesting claim - the nats never planned for black people to have electricity?

Its an oft repeated one, but factually incorrect. Electricity distribution was mostly income based, not explicitly racially based.
Rural area's didn't get electricity till quite late.

Urban area's did. Urban black area's like Soweto got electricity earlier than rural white area's..
eg - Late 70's / early 80's saw electrification of Soweto. - https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA10212019_17656

The bantustan's were expected to do their own thing, which led to pretty much - not much electricity until 90's onward rollouts of "electricity for all" from central government.

Quite arguably, the ANC actually slowed electricity provision when they sabotaged Koeberg. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0018-229X2015000200003

Eskom history here -
www.sahistory.org.za

A Short History of ESKOM, Part 1 (1923-2001)

This short history of Electrical Supply Commission (ESKOM) aims to provide an overview of the history of the power utility over its first seventy-eight years. The significance of these dates is as follows
www.sahistory.org.za www.sahistory.org.za
 
itareanlnotani said:
Interesting claim - the nats never planned for black people to have electricity?

Its an oft repeated one, but factually incorrect. Electricity distribution was mostly income based, not explicitly racially based.
Rural area's didn't get electricity till quite late.

Urban area's did. Urban black area's like Soweto got electricity earlier than rural white area's..
eg - Late 70's / early 80's saw electrification of Soweto. - https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA10212019_17656

The bantustan's were expected to do their own thing, which led to pretty much - not much electricity until 90's onward rollouts of "electricity for all" from central government.

Quite arguably, the ANC actually slowed electricity provision when they sabotaged Koeberg. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0018-229X2015000200003

Eskom history here -
www.sahistory.org.za

A Short History of ESKOM, Part 1 (1923-2001)

This short history of Electrical Supply Commission (ESKOM) aims to provide an overview of the history of the power utility over its first seventy-eight years. The significance of these dates is as follows
www.sahistory.org.za www.sahistory.org.za
Click to expand...
ya, I'm sure it can be argued either way but its a point that is often not discussed. The ANC failed to give what the Nats held back.

The bigger issue is that the ANC stretched Eskom every way possible. They promised everyone electricity, they bloated Eskom with extra people, failed to maintain and upgrade the grid.
In theory they could have milked Eskom one way and the enterprise would have held. Its the draining of it every way possible that is the failure.
 
Nerfherder said:
ya, I'm sure it can be argued either way but its a point that is often not discussed. The ANC failed to give what the Nats held back.

The bigger issue is that the ANC stretched Eskom every way possible. They promised everyone electricity, they bloated Eskom with extra people, failed to maintain and upgrade the grid.
In theory they could have milked Eskom one way and the enterprise would have held. Its the draining of it every way possible that is the failure.
Click to expand...
My one string banjo is that the ANC never saw Eskom as an electricity provider, only as a golden goose to be raped for personal gain. All their focus was on this, electricity production was well down the list as in ANC cadre first, ANC cadre pals second, ANC third etc etc.
 
Oldfut said:
My one string banjo is that the ANC never saw Eskom as an electricity provider, only as a golden goose to be raped for personal gain. All their focus was on this, electricity production was well down the list as in ANC cadre first, ANC cadre pals second, ANC third etc etc.
Click to expand...
yes, and they still haven't realised that the golden goose is cooked now.
 
Romy_ said:
Honestly, the DA isn't much better. They will also use Eskom as a cash cow. Just remember that the DA support the same employment model the ANC does. They say equal this and equal that, but to win over the majority vote they did stipulate that the amended labour laws are here to stay.

Politics are filled with special people that want to be wealthy famous and not work for a living. Their goal is empty promises.

Let us focus on Eskom, it will take 3 years per boiler to rebuild it. That is 3 years per unit for every unit. Consider the state of disrepair and the availability of parts. You are looking at a 3 to 5-year outage per unit. Most power stations had little or no repair work. So changes that entire power stations will be off for a minimum of 5 years is very possible. How many power stations can we be without?

Also, consider that we are currently generating 22 GWh to 23 GWh with level 4 to 6 load shedding. Not to mention the safety margin.

In short, we have no solution, unless Russia or America are willing to build power stations on our behalf. But not even they will be able to keep corruption out as they will be forced to make use of local skills. That is a big problem.

An example is Elon Musk with Starlink. They want half of Starlink! I mean WTF.
Click to expand...

DA is not perfect, but infinitely better than ANC

What you've said here is honestly stupid
 
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