Powerdown in South Africa January 22, 2008
Posted by Ralph Pina in : Climate Change, Conservation, Sustainability , 4comments
This post is only tangentially related to travel, but it has a lot to do with sustainability, so I thought I would vent here on this blog anyway. As I sit here writing this, South Africa has entered a period of rolling blackouts. The cause is uncontested: the government failed to allow the national power utility, Eskom, to create generation capacity way back in the ’90s. After an unprecedented period of economic growth the chickens have come home to roost and the reserve margin is down to 8% so that the grid has no resilience when capacity is temporarily reduced by an outage or when demand spikes. Meanwhile the demand trendline shows unabated growth. The crisis is expected to last for another seven years, by when additional generating capacity should come online.
But what interests me are the reactions to the crisis from my fellow citizens, which only serve to show how difficult it is to change behaviour and how invested in our energy-intensive consumer-age paradigm we are. (more…)
