You get home from work, close your door to the cold and switch on your favourite soapie. Your husband begins cooking dinner, the kids start running a hot bath. You switch on a heater and put a load of dirty washing in the machine.
It’s this type of behaviour that triggers power shortages and outages during winter. The season’s daily power peak, which starts at 5pm, when families start trickling home from work, and ends at 9pm, when everyone begins moving towards their beds, can push power usage up 5 000 megawatts on summer’s peak usage.
This is more power than the 3 600MW SA’s biggest power station can produce, making it a considerable factor in dealing with power demand. “There is a bit of difference throughout the day (between summer and winter), but the real difference is the pattern of demand,” says Eskom spokeswoman Hilary Joffe.
Eskom’s grid has a total capacity of about 41 000MW, but is frequently not functioning at this level because of planned and unplanned outages.
On Monday the country’s capacity was at 35 056MW to meet a forecasted 33 097MW peak usage.
Current planned maintenance and outages have taken about 8 000MW off the grid. But during winter last year, peak usage went up to highs of 37 000MW, meaning that at current functionality, demand would outweigh supply.
But Joffe says that by mid-winter, planned maintenance will have decreased significantly.
“We said all along that the system would be very tight… Late next year (when the first phase of construction of Medupi power plant in Limpopo is complete) the constraint on supply will ease significantly.”
However, she admits that some planned maintenance and unplanned outages will continue throughout winter, as maintenance has become an essential for the parastatal. “For a few years now, we had been deferring non-essential maintenance, but you cannot carry on doing that, it’s not sustainable.
“The non-essential becomes essential… and the performance of the system wanes.”
She says Eskom has made maintenance a priority and performed more maintenance in winter last year than usual.
Citizens can help to keep the power on by paying attention to daily peaks and using non-essential appliances when demand is lower.
Eskom has the following tips to save electricity:
* Switch off geysers between 6am and 10pm and reduce the thermostat to 60°C.
* Insulate geyser and water pipes and replace geysers with solar water heaters using Eskom’s rebate programme.
* Replace incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving bulbs and switch off lights in unoccupied rooms.
* Shower rather than bath as less hot water is used and install an energy-efficient shower head.
* Reduce the operating time of pool pumps and set the pool pump to operate between 12am and 5am, a low-energy usage time.
* Don’t leave appliances in standby mode. Unplug all appliances – for example cellphone chargers – that are not in use.
theresa.taylor@inl.co.za
The Star Africa
No comments:
Post a Comment