What is load-shedding and why is it occurring in South Africa?
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It’s also occurring in Texas. Here’s how it works, it’s for similar reasons.
The “grid” is generally built to have some portions that can be isolated from others. That way if there’s a fire or some other disaster, the parts being affected can be disconnected and any surges or other problems the disaster causes won’t affect the rest of the grid.
If people are trying to use more power than the plants can generate, that counts as “a disaster”. It can cause problems that damages the *power plants*, so it’s really important to stop that from happening because that damage isn’t just expensive, it can take MONTHS to repair. So when it starts becoming clear that people are going to use more power than can be generated, some parts of the grid are “shed” or disconnected. Since those people are now using NO power, there’s more power for the people who are still connected.
In Texas, it happens because the state government decided the electric grid should be a free market. The regulations in place do not reward power companies for keeping the power on 100% of the time, but instead rewards them for selling power and lets them charge even more money if load shedding happens and they lose some money. So the power companies have not built redundant plants or been quick to add capacity, because even when they fail they get paid. The Texas Government responded to this issue by allowing them to charge *even more* money when they fail, so guess what’s happening as summer approaches?
South Africa has a similar problem for different reasons. Their power infrastructure was not built to provide reliable power to the entire country but instead to only serve some parts most reliably. The idea was if things got bad they could “shed” the parts of the country they didn’t care about.
So in both places, the government set up a policy that doesn’t punish the power companies if they don’t supply enough power, and it means the companies are doing the absolute minimum they have to do. Our hope is that as Texas and South Africa develop into modern nations, they’ll adopt policies that treat electricity as a public utility instead of a profit center or a privilege for a caste.
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