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Load shedding is the correct technical term for it. It's not just a South African thing either, industrial consumers in Europe have the same stipulation in their power contracts: in case of emergency, the power company (network operator) may choose to suspend power delivery to protect the grid.

However, in the EU this 1) isn't a regular occurrence, and 2) the grid has a tiered system for load shedding. I can't find a reference for the tier classifications right now, but if I remember correctly: tier 1 consumers (the ones who will be disconnected first) are heavy industries with huge power draw, tier 2 are other commercial uses, tier 3 is residential, and tier 4 is critical infrastructure (emergency services).

I don't think I've ever experienced a load shedding event that affected residential areas. There have been local blackouts but I don't recall any grid-wide emergency events.

Texas had tier 3 level of load shedding recently.

Based on the incompetent decisions that ERCOT has made over the past few "severe weather events", I would say ERCOT and ESKOM are eerily similar.

All my reading said that the decisions ERCOT made during the weather event were all very competent. They kept the grid from collapsing, which was their job.

The fact that extensive load shedding and brownouts etc needed to happen was not a result of decisions made during the weather event, but lack of infrastructure investment over decades (that may or may not have been under the control of ERCOT, rather than the legislature and state government regulators, but ERCOT certainly was on board with/lobbying for the conditions of deregulation that led to them).

During the weather event... ERCOT, the grid operator, did their job very competently. Making more capacity come online or reducing consumer demand was not really something that could be done during the weather event. They kept the grid from collapsing -- and it nearly did collapse, it was a close call. That was their job during the event.

> All my reading said that the decisions ERCOT made during the weather event were all very competent. They kept the grid from collapsing, which was their job.

I respectfully disagree. Demand might have been twice what supply was, but the way the load shedding was done wasn't smart at all. The rolling blackouts were done on a roughly 18-48 hour basis, i.e. if you lost power you probably lost it for at least 18 hours and I know plenty of people who lost it for much longer, up to 48 hours.

If demand was double what the supply was then it should have been possible to give people power for say 2 hours every 4 hours. Or maybe 6 hours every 12 hours. If demand outstripped supply by a factor of 4 then 3 hours every 12 hours.

But that's not what happened. A lot of houses have gas furnaces but they need electricity to run the fans and the ignition system and such. People died in their houses either from the cold or from running their cars in their garages trying to stay warm. A lot of pipes were burst due to not enough heat in the buildings.

I can think of at least a dozen ways in which the load shedding could have been better managed. I wouldn't agree that it was very competent.

> If demand was double what the supply was then it should have been possible to give people power for say 2 hours every 4 hours

The problem is if that electricity is being used for heat, the draw of the 2 hour on periods will increase to make up for the time off. Perhaps even resulting in more total usage, because when power is on, people will set the thermostat to 80 instead of 65, anticipating the power going off and it getting colder. When really you need everyone's expectations of comfort to change to 40 degrees (half the delta T).

The only way to win and supply some power to all houses is to keep the duty cycle so low that the amount of resistive heating equipment becomes the limiting factor (1 hour every 6 hours?). I don't know if they could have managed this, but it's certainly more complicated to figure out than simply lowering the period of the rolling blackouts.

Only so much of the load is heating, and heaters can only draw so much current.

Even 1 hour every few would stop food from rotting and let people do important tasks.

> Even 1 hour every few would stop food from rotting

I just put my food outside, in the car. I never lost power, but I didn't want to waste any electricity on cooling food when it was needed so badly.

ERCOT failed to adjust pricing appropriately after the initial emergency, which allowed energy producers to milk the situation for billions of dollars more than is fair or reasonable. It's not like their input costs went up by billions of dollars that required compensation.

> All my reading said

Comparing that to "All my expierincing" first hand. Not even close to the same thing. They would not have been in the stressed situtation in the first place had they enforced the recommended corrections for cold weather protection in the first place. The fact that they had to turn off power generation because pipes were freezing at the generating stations is an absolute joke, and is the prime cause of the stress.

The local weather forecasts remind people to move plants indoors, cover exposed plumbing, etc. Maybe they should also start including a friendly reminder to the local power plants to also cover exposed plumbing, but why would they listen to that when they've ignored government sanctioned reports from investigations into previous failures?

> ERCOT, the grid operator, did their job very competently "Turn off the power so the demand goes away" Check "Issue rolling black outs so that the demand is lowered and manageable, and give people a fighting chance" Nope. These were absolutely not rolling black outs, but static black outs. The method they chose to "save the grid" was just as incompetent as not maintaining their systems in the first place.

Thank you for more info!

Do you know of any good journalistic coverage of this, since apparently I've been reading bad stuff?

It seems important info for those who don't have first-hand professional experience to get.

I read articles from every where. Local stations had coverage of the damage and lack of "rolling" black outs, national outlets had coverage as well, and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing international coverage from BBC, Daily Mail, etc. I can't remember where I was seeing the scathing reports on ERCOT's ineptitude, but they were plenty.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-fai... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9270343/Texas-perfe...

just a snippet of a quick search from soooo many articles

American here--I've experienced load shedding once. The problem was a lineman started a wildfire that took out the primary source of power for the town. Until the line was repaired there was nowhere near enough power available, they directed what they had to things like the hospital etc and everyone else was in the dark.

There is also the mess we currently have in California. High winds blew stuff into high power lines and started a bad wildfire. In the lawsuits that followed the utility was told to shut down the risky lines under high wind conditions--which of course causes massive outages. Of course the utility is "at fault" because the ecology types blocked efforts to keep the vegetation away from the lines.

The utility is at fault because they didn't spend enough money on maintenance. As a for-profit company in an established industry, PG&E won't ever be able to "pop" like a SaaS company does, so profits and salaries for executives and shareholders have to come from somewhere. Spending less on maintenance won't bite you - until it does - but until then, thats money that can be put elsewhere like CEO pockets.

PG&E is at fault because they refused to properly maintain the power lines, and lines that had been hanging for years from the same supports where the supports failed are the cause of the fires.

See here: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/long-term-wear-found-o...

https://www.kqed.org/news/11792217/1987-report-suggested-pge...

I can't find it right now, but there was an absolutely fantastic RCA report that included all the information on the wearing down of the hooks and how this could have all been prevented.

The better technical term for what South Africa has is rolling black-outs that increase in frequency (and ultimately duration) depending on the amount of load that needs to be shed.

South Africa also has actual load shedding, where industrial customers are asked then forced to reduce usage, but the black-outs are entirely different. They are region-by-region complete loss of power for all but the hospitals (but often take out hospitals and emergency services too).

Compounding this issue, the grid is not designed to be switched on and off frequently. While there is a set schedule for the rolling blackouts, transformers and other equipment will blow under the sudden loads, meaning your regional blackout may last a lot longer than planned. You may also get blackouts sooner or completely out of schedule for region, for which no explanation is given.

> industrial consumers in Europe have the same stipulation in their power contracts: in case of emergency, the power company (network operator) may choose to suspend power delivery to protect the grid.

You can't really compare.

Industries can chose in their contract to be part of the load shedding system. It's done with their agreement and the system is purely based on the grid frequency. The disconnection is done on site in an orderly fashion. In a way, it's probably more correct to view it as industries electing to temporary disconnect rather than the provider stopping supplying them.

> I don't recall any grid-wide emergency events.

The European electrical grid is extremely resilient. It was accidently split in two a couple months ago and that was barely noticeable for the customers of either half.

This app is also known for its humorous take the quite serious subject matter. The WHAT’S NEW section in the Google Play Store is known for sarcastic titbits with the fictional Jeff working hard to keep us up to date with the imminent darkness. The app's name itself, Eskom se Push, is wordplay on an extremely vulgar South African insult and feeds into the popular dislike of Eskom.

This sounds like a nightmare!

Eskom seems to have been around for a long time, but this problem seems to have kicked in a little over a decade ago.

Did something recently happen to Eskom to make them incompetent?

Corruption.

It's two-sided.

Apartheid South Africa's government focused on providing electricity mostly for the white minority, which it did well, but the majority of South African, especially in the rural regions, lived with no or unreliable power supply. Post 1994, with removal of sanctions, the economy opened up. There was a lot of international investment in South Africa. The economy grew strongly and the demand for electricity significantly increased.

The supply side was woefully mismanaged and didn't nearly keep up with the pace of the growth in demand. Corruption is definitely a key reason, as others here mention, with the effect being that power plants are not adequatly maintained and new planned power plants going far over budget and missing deadlines [1].

Besides corruption, there are some policitical constraints. Eskom provides power to municipalities who often don't pay. Soweto, with 1.3 million residents owe Eskom in excess of $1 billion [2]. The South African Supreme Court of Appeal has ruled that Eskom is not allowed to cut power to non-paying municipalities [3]. In contrast to a free-market system, Eskom price hikes are subject to regulatory approval [4].

One could debate the relative significance of each of these factors, but it's by no means due to only a single one of these.

[1] https://www.news24.com/fin24/Budget/how-medupi-and-kusile-ar...

[2] https://mg.co.za/article/2019-10-18-00-why-we-dont-pay-for-p...

[3] https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/news/eskom-cannot-cut-el...

[4] https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/companies-and-deals/electric...

I think you are missing the most important part. Even after Apartheid, the existing utilities provided for the entire population. However, there has not been any new generation capacity since 1994. Instead, the maximum generation capacity has shrunk year on year as boilers and other key parts of the power plants fail and aren't replaced.

I'm not OP - that they explicitly mentioned this:

>> The supply side was woefully mismanaged and didn't nearly keep up with the pace of the growth in demand.

> However, there has not been any new generation capacity since 1994.

That's not true. Majuba Power Station was commissioned between 1006 and 2001, although planning started in the Apartheid era. Gourikwa Power Station and Newcastle Cogeneration Plant were commissioned in 2007.

There are a few wind farms built after 2001: Hopefield, Coega, Darling, Klipheuwel, Dassiesklip Wind Energy Facility and Jeffreys Bay.

And solar: Kalkbult, Mulilo Renewable Energy Solar PV Prieska, De Aar Solar PV, Mulilo Renewable Energy Solar PV De Aar, SA Mainstream Renewable Power Droogfontein, Letsatsi Solar Park, Lesedi PV Project, Kathu Solar Energy Facility 1, Sishen Solar Facility and the Jasper Solar Energy Project.

But these were not enough to keep up with the demand.

Majuba Power Station was commissioned between 1996* and 2001

> Did something recently happen to Eskom to make them incompetent?

Demand for electricity consistently went up over the past 20+ years, with no matching increase in generation capacity.

Maintenance of current power plants hasn't been great either, and the supply/demand situation is precarious such that if any one of the power generation plant is offline for maintenance, there are likely to be compensatory blackouts somewhere.

Unfortunately, an under-moderated chat feature is considered a risk these days, like an open email relay or an open proxy. I personally think Google erred too far on the side of caution here, but developers should be aware that chat features aren't as cheap to add as they used to be; they change the risk model of the app.

This. Another example: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295496/malaysiakini-gui...

> Malaysian news site fined $124,000 for five reader comments

> Malaysiakini’s co-founder avoided jail time

IMHO a lot of sites and apps should just remove chat/comment functionality and only allow emoji reactions.

And here's a link to the app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ashwhale.s...

OMG. This is as bad or even worse than Texas or California...

It is far worse, but South Africa has an inept and corrupt government, I wonder what the excuse is for Texas?

I suspect the truth is, in the narrow domain of electric power distribution, Texas too has an inept government that’s beholden to certain vested interests in the garb of “free markets”.

This is a state that has fetishized “light touch regulation” so much that it, for most of the state, has its own grid to avoid dealing with Federal authorities. And repeatedly failed to take action to get power companies to winterize their equipment even though cold snaps in Texas are not unheard of — they’ve had disruption in 1989 and 2011, in addition to other near misses.

Let’s not even get into the wisdom of a market that allows Griddy to offer wholesale prices without caps to retail customers.

So hang on, why is it that South Africa is “corrupt”, but Texas is “beholden to certain vested interests”?

Did any one person say both of those things?

That's just more words for corrupt

The distinction-without-a-difference between these two phrases is exactly the point of the comment you're responding to.

...and presumably also the point of the comment it was responding to.

> I suspect the truth is, in the narrow domain of electric power distribution, Texas too has an inept government...

This is an absurd comparison. South Africa owns and runs its power utility. The result is that they struggle to provide electricity on an ongoing basis. According to Wikipedia, small business owners in South Africa said that load shedding was the number one challenge that they faced in Q1 of 2019.[0]

Texas does not own or run its utilities. They are privately run, and are given wide latitude by the state. The result is that the worst of the utilities are tragically only able to provide 99.95% uptime, with some power consumers experiencing outages for a few days per decade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

Yes, Texas in the realm of power distribution is probably a paradise by comparison with South Africa, but compared to its peers (other US states), Texas has a very non-resilient, or fragile, power distribution system that we know will "crash" when faced with a cold snap. Given that they have known this since at least 1989, I think it's not unfair to use the word "inept".

The giant power bills are just icing on the cake of bad policy-making.

Why would you think it is any different? ERCOT was recommended to protect its power generation capabilities from severe winter weather for over 10 years, yet the Republican leadership did nothing about it. That's either corruption or sheer ineptitude.

There is no comparison.