What did we use for light before we had candles?
Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2014 11:34 am
Note for poison dwarfs: the purpose of this post is to promote tourism in South Africa. Ghost walks are increasingly popular in the major cities such as Johannesburg. Some of the ghosts are, almost unavoidably, South African23 Nov 2014 Sunday Times
ANDRÉ JURGENS and ISAAC MAHLANGU PHILANI NOMBEMBE and NASHIRA DAVIDS
Lack of fuel blamed for blackouts
Eskom says diesel supplier PetroSA cannot keep up with rising demand
THE lights have gone out and now Eskom says its diesel supplier — state entity PetroSA — has added to its woes.
There have been sporadic power outages and rolling blackouts around South Africa this weekend, and Eskom’s electricity supply over the next few days depends largely on frantic efforts to stockpile millions of litres of diesel.
The national grid has been under severe strain due to unplanned maintenance at power plants and the collapse of a coal silo at Majuba power station on November 1.
By lunchtime on Friday there was not enough diesel to prop up the wafer-thin reserve margin of available power, and all major municipalities have been asked to implement rolling blackouts as well.
Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said: “The issue here is that ever since the Majuba incident we have been running the diesel generators very hard and putting a lot of pressure on our suppliers, PetroSA and Chevron. They have been basically pumped dry, not Chevron so much but certainly PetroSA. PetroSA is trying to get ships in.
“On a normal day we would have survived this but . . . we just ran out of diesel,” he said.
Eskom spent R10.5-billion on diesel fuel in 2013-14 to run these emergency plants
