Total Blackout South Africa

I think it will be good to start a new MAIN TOPIC on what people should do once Eskom goes down completely.

After a few hours or days with Eskom completely down there will be no water on tap, petrol, food, cell phone connections, you name it it won't be there.

It would be like war and we will have to survive on our own. Water will be the first priority and then food and then the other necessities. Communication will be difficult transportation will be nearly impossible So what will we do?

Lets talk

There might be some stores and petrol stations that will still operate for a day or two with their generators, but they will only accept cash, as card payments will not be possible. due to all banks will be offline. Then the looting will start. It will be total chaos. I don't think it will even be safe to be on the roads. The gangs will force you off the road and empty your tank Mad Max style.  

Bringing the Grid back is not a simple process and will take some time. They will bring back one municipality at a time and wait for the grid to stabilise before switching on the following one. It will probably take between 2-3 weeks to bring the grid back online. That is assuming all infrastructure stays in tack. Some will obviously be in fault mode due to stolen cables and some in fault mode due to shorting due to damaged infrastructure. These faults will first have to be repaired. 

 Once the grid is back up, you will still not be able to buy food from your local shopping center, as they will first have to repairs everything that was destroyed by the looting and then restock. The worst for me will be the lack of communication with loved ones. during this time. My mom is 83 years old and lives alone in a flat 300 kilometers away from  me. I will have to drive through immediately and pick her up. I try and keep my MP200 diesel full at all times Her flat will have power with the inverter, batteries and panels I installed for her, but without water and food, she will not survive. 

I might be wrong, but if you think a blackout will be bad, an actual one will be twice as bad.

I doubt this will ever happen. After all, this is why we have loadshedding. Other countries like Nigeria and Tanzania have been having loadshedding long before SA and till today, they are still managing. We will be ok, 😀

Ekstra 5 solar panels, and a pallet full of baked beans and bully beef. Dont buy the cheapest bully beef. 

There is already dooms day text messaging devices that works over 433mhz lora.  Buy a couple. 

If you have pool, extra chlorine to keep water clean. 

 

3 hours ago, hoohloc said:

I doubt this will ever happen. After all, this is why we have loadshedding. Other countries like Nigeria and Tanzania have been having loadshedding long before SA and till today, they are still managing. We will be ok, 😀

There's this. Loadshedding, for all the damage it inflicts, is a way of keeping the grid up and running.

Political parties that have been going to court to get an order to tell Eskom to stop shedding are a bigger problem. If they succeed, which is not a given.

Eskom are shedding because they can't provide enough power. I'm not saying this is OK, but if they just took their foot off of the load shedding pedal, there likely would be a complete collapse - courtesy of know-nothing politicians trying to score bragging points.

I do expect load shedding stages to increase. A recent court order has instructed Eskom that they may not shed police stations. hospitals, clinics and schools (government institutions only, privateers are are not affected by this order). Eskom protested that it's really not that simple, that they would have to further segment the grid, or get municipalities to do so.

The court then did two things
1) Gave them 60 days to make arrangements
2) Reminded them that the order just says "power", it doesn't say "grid power". So the provision of generators or some other energy source will fulfill the order.

60 days from some day earlier this week.

I can't say that I am unsympathetic to the order, but it does seem to me that Eskom have no option but to shed load elsewhere. So either the concession they are giving to eThekwini is going to come to an end, "load reduction" in the townships is going to increase, and/or load shedding stages will go up.

None of which is good. None of which is doing anything but inflicting huge pain in the country. But any of which is better than just letting everybody turn on anything they like until the grid really does collapse.

What the court is going to do if this order is not obeyed is not clear. Firing the minister charged with doing all of this is not actually going to change anything.

Edited May 7, 20233 yr by Bobster.
fix tpyos

4 hours ago, Don said:

There might be some stores and petrol stations that will still operate for a day or two with their generators, but they will only accept cash, as card payments will not be possible. due to all banks will be offline. Then the looting will start. It will be total chaos. I don't think it will even be safe to be on the roads. The gangs will force you off the road and empty your tank Mad Max style.  

I was involved in Y2k remediation for a company that I won't name here, but which is a JSE top 40 share. IE they are big. Their preparations, apart from massive software remediation and firmware updating projects, included installation of generators and pre-buying large amounts of diesel. This is diesel that is sitting in bowsers or even in tankers, but already paid for, so don't think it's available to anybody else. On the night they had tankers, with drivers, standing by, or driving around in circles near their sites. In some cases board members were equipped with special phones that used a satellite connection, in case they had to have a quorum make an emergency decision and were unable to assemble or to communicate via other means.

I would bet that such plans have been revived.

The Netcare group had three hospitals in Gauteng (and we're talking 20 odd years ago) that could run for a week with no municipal services. 

Their CEO was in the papers last month saying something like "the difference between a challenge and a disaster is preparation". He said that most of their hospitals would now be able to function through a considerable outage, and that space had been made so that key staff members, and their families, could be accommodated and would have water, power, three meals a day, internet connections and protection. This is partly about keeping the business up and running, partly about keeping those staff in South Africa.

He said that he didn't think it would come to this, but that if you can foresee a thing, no matter how unlikely, then failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

As I said, I saw a lot of similar plans being made ahead of Y2k and I think a lot of businesses (though not, alas, small ones) will be able to keep going. They have made these plans before.  It won't be pretty, but it won't be the apocalypse either.

Edited May 7, 20233 yr by Bobster.

6 minutes ago, Bobster. said:

As I said, I saw a lot of similar plans being made ahead of Y2k and I think a lot of businesses (though not, alas, small ones) will be able to keep going. They have made these plans before.  It won't be pretty, but it won't be the apocalypse either.

Yes agreed.  SA had 15 years of no-power training.  In countries like Germany they are totally un-prepared for black-outs.  I heard that German telcos had standby power for 15 minutes.

This subject can be discussed and it is good to make some basic preparations, however, do not fall for this constant fear-mongering.  The last time I fell for fear-mongering was during the start of Covid.  I have decided that any newly announced end-of-world-disasters can be eliminated by simply switching off the MSM news.  I will never, never again believe a word of the fake MSM spin.

The Eskom problem is complicated and has many sources but purposeful sabotage is most likely the over-bearing one.  I suspect it is 100x worse than what any minister will ever admit.  Some of it might be attributable to sub-contractors and some to political party infighting.  However, the largest portion is directed from over the waters, by 3-letter international NGO agencies.  The recent ICC flip-flop has proven again that SA politicians are, like everywhere else, just puppets-on-a-string, controlled by the puppet-masters connected with the WEF and the Elites.  Realize that we live in a fake world where everything is just another movie scene to brainwash the sheeple.  Luckily, some people now finally wake up to what is happening.

11 minutes ago, Modina said:

The Eskom problem is complicated and has many sources but purposeful sabotage is most likely the over-bearing one.  I suspect it is 100x worse than what any minister will ever admit.  Some of it might be attributable to sub-contractors and some to political party infighting.

There's been some court cases recently, with sentences handed down. What seems clear to me is that there are lots of small operators. Several of the people charged got a family member to register some company, then they get somebody inside Eskom to process invoices from that company for work that was never done, then they split the money three ways. It's more likely multiple (1000s!) of individual scams than one big, co-ordinated raid.

Not that I think that any leniency should be shown. 15 years ago they might have tried it to see if they could get away with it. Now they do it with the knowledge that they are inflicting harm on every institution, private or public, within this country, that what they do is costing income, jobs and even lives.

Eskom is a huge, widespread entity and their controls are clearly lacking. They don't need engineers, they need auditors and accountants and all their processes checked and revised.

10 minutes ago, Bobster. said:

There's been some court cases recently, with sentences handed down. What seems clear to me is that there are lots of small operators. Several of the people charged got a family member to register some company, then they get somebody inside Eskom to process invoices from that company for work that was never done, then they split the money three ways. It's more likely multiple (1000s!) of individual scams than one big, co-ordinated raid.

That is corruption.  I am talking about sabotage.

13 minutes ago, Modina said:

That is corruption.  I am talking about sabotage.

As well. It goes like this.

1) There is a problem or there is some maintenance needed
2) A contractor is called
3) Contractor does the work
4) On the way out contractor, for example, loosens a plug that will result in some bearing running dry, that will cause a failure and generate more work for him.

Again not one big operation, lots of little ones. 

There was also a tanker driver who was running a nice little scam - with help from a friend.

The tankers are weighed going in and on exit. The difference in weight is the amount of diesel that Eskom will pay for. But this guy would drive in, get weighed, then head for a gate in the perimeter fence that he'd opened, offload all the diesel into a neighbouring farmer's tanks, then get weighed on the way out again. Eskom pays, the farmer gets his tanks filled cheaply (because the tanker driver is getting something for his efforts). Money for old rope.

All of this makes me angry. These people know what they are doing and they know the consequences of it. 

Edited May 7, 20233 yr by Bobster.
sppeling

14 minutes ago, Modina said:

That is corruption.  I am talking about sabotage.

My point is that there's not one big plot, but lots of little ones. A single big plot might be easier to identify and deal with.

5 hours ago, hoohloc said:

I doubt this will ever happen. After all, this is why we have loadshedding. Other countries like Nigeria and Tanzania have been having loadshedding long before SA and till today, they are still managing. We will be ok, 😀

Add me on one that does not belief it will happen in the short term. While we can shed enough load to run all the auxiliary equipment at power stations the grid will function and be able to provide some power in the network. 

So far we have to thank those in the control room for the way they manage whole network. 

Ignore all these talk/fear of a total blackout. In any case we cannot provide for all the things that will hit us if it had to happen. Unless you can provide for 4 weeks with all you would need at home. 

I don't think that the grid will go down by accident, there are however a lot of political appointees inside of Eskom who may decide that it is in their best interests.

Elections scheduled for next year, so who knows what desperate people may do to stay in power.

47 minutes ago, Sc00bs said:

I don't think that the grid will go down by accident, there are however a lot of political appointees inside of Eskom who may decide that it is in their best interests.

Elections scheduled for next year, so who knows what desperate people may do to stay in power.

But there might be both sides of the political spectrum present in the control room from where the whole network is controlled. 

The day the municipal sewage system becomes unavailable, the privileged elite will be those people who are on the bucket system.

Hope for the best but prepare for the worst

Should we not at least collectively prepare for the worst.

I have solar very convenient and ensures that

I can pump the water from my rainwater tanks (30000 litres)

But what happens when the shops run empty and I cannot buy food

I live at the sea if I but an electric motor in my boat I can go fishing fun and food.

 I could have had have had contact with the outside world through Starlink but

SA is one of the few countries in Africa without access:

"The delays were suspected to be linked to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s (Icasa’s) equity rules for Internet service providers (ISPs)."

the reason why we are in this loadshedding mess in the first place

We have to think and we can to ensure that should  the fan be struck we will at least be able to survive

My dad worked for Eskom letaba power station  when Eskom was still the good old Eskom. 

I can remember him often talking about in the event of a total grid failure what has to be done to get the system up and running in an as short time as possible so can only think in those days they were prepared and trained for such an event  . 

 Got to wonder if they even prepared for grid failure and if it happens if the police are prepared to protect the network from cable theft .

I have now at least a small system that is perfect for our need that can now run 24/7 if need be .

I am one of the lucky ones that have a water spring running 24/7 366😜 days of the years  through my property and have pump that can pump water so water and electricity is not a problem . 

But for there rest , Let's hope for the best .

Don't know if this has been discussed but what are the banks doing or have they done in preparation for an Eskom doomsday scenario? Do they have offshore back-up servers and other sufficient redundancies so that digital financial records/footprints are all maintained in a country without a functional grid for a prolonged period?  I can't really comprehend what happens to our financial system in a grid collapse. Insurance companies have been sending notifications to clients informing damages under grid failure scenario are not covered so they are obviously considering the possibility. That being said, I am also in the camp thinking we won't get to a grid collapse but might see higher stages of load shedding than ever before.

I doubt a complete grid failure will ever happen, its why we have loadshedding.

What will however happen is loadshedding will get progressively worse. We had loadhedding every few weeks at the start. Months we didnt have loadshedding.
Then it became every few weeks, then every week, then every day, then the stages went up, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. We are sitting at a continuous stage 6 going into winter, when demand is higher.

It wont get better any time soon, at least not for the next 2 - 5 years, this is thinking logically and due to the lack of political will power of our current leadership which lets be honest, wont change any time soon, at least not while they're being funded by a BRICS country thats currently at war.

What will happen is services will start to degrade further. Generators at pump stations will begin to break down and will not be repaired timelessly due to all the red tape in allocating a tender for a company to maintain it, which in turn will cause freshwater to drop and sewerage to back up.

Cell service will be spotty with towers not having enough time to recharge and more batteries being stolen. The same goes for fibre.

Stations will likely run out of fuel as people will buy more for their generators and our imports will not be able to meet demand.

Malls and shopping centres will start to close down as companies will struggle to get produce and goods to the stores. This is likely when we will see something similar to that of the Durban Riots.

 

What I recommend is to keep a few weeks of tinned food and make friends with your neighbours, its a good time to have friends.
Join the local NHW and chat with them about a plan of action should the worst happen. Most have a plan already to blockade the area to keep residents safe.

9 hours ago, Modina said:

...controlled by the puppet-masters connected with the WEF and the Elites

Never call these vermin elites, they are nothing but parasites.

Back to topic...  One thing that bothers me is if the load increases beyond generating capacity, the frequency drops below 47.5 Hz, then the "generators" disconnect from the transmission lines, (isolate themselves). This will  continue in a domino effect if the load is not shed in time.

Now lets say this happens, why will it take 2 to 4 weeks to "black start" again? Surly the generating units will still be running independently, just disconnected from the transmission lines, and maybe running into dummy loads or pumping water between ballast dams?

All that should be needed to restart is slowly bring the loads and generating units back online through the transmission lines. It naturally needs to be synchronized one generating unit at a time, but 2 - 4 weeks, that's slow.

Maybe some Eskom past, present employee or contractor could explain fully? 🤔

 

 

8 hours ago, PsyWulf said:

 

Thanks. That goes some way to dealing with a question in my non-engineer head: synchronisation of all the working sources that are available to the grid.

Eskom gave a press presentation in 2021 (IIRC) in which they talked about another factor that causes delays. The warmer a generator is, the quicker it can get up to it's rated output. And vice versa. So you fire up the black start stations - this takes hours, but relatively few hours. But all the while the other stations are cooling, so the next set of stations takes longer to start up and so on.

2-4 weeks? In that same presentation, Eskom said 6 to 14 days in a worst case scenario, with some parts of the grid coming back on quicker than others. 

8 hours ago, TimCam said:

All that should be needed to restart is slowly bring the loads and generating units back online through the transmission lines. It naturally needs to be synchronized one generating unit at a time, but 2 - 4 weeks, that's slow.

About 8-10 years ago I worked for a huge Mining company and at that time we already put plans together in the event of a total grid collapse. At that time Eskom gave us 3-4 weeks as their best estimate to bring the grid back online. They also informed us it is a not that easy to bring back the grid. At that stage they only had 2 Engineers that were capable of bringing back the grid in the country. I am sure they are no longer working for Eskom. Hopefully they left their notes behind or trained someone to be able to do it. 

URL to the rather long Eskom presentation
 

 

9 hours ago, TimCam said:

Never call these vermin elites, they are nothing but parasites.

Back to topic...  One thing that bothers me is if the load increases beyond generating capacity, the frequency drops below 47.5 Hz, then the "generators" disconnect from the transmission lines, (isolate themselves). This will  continue in a domino effect if the load is not shed in time.

Now lets say this happens, why will it take 2 to 4 weeks to "black start" again? Surly the generating units will still be running independently, just disconnected from the transmission lines, and maybe running into dummy loads or pumping water between ballast dams?

All that should be needed to restart is slowly bring the loads and generating units back online through the transmission lines. It naturally needs to be synchronized one generating unit at a time, but 2 - 4 weeks, that's slow.

Maybe some Eskom past, present employee or contractor could explain fully? 🤔

 

If we do have a total black out the following will happen.

Generator circuit breakers will disconnect from the grid. before the generators go in to reverse mode and start to work as a motor thus importing power from the grid.

All boilers will trip (on Hight pressure) no more steam going to the turbine thus the boiler steam pressure increases rapidly and will go into what is called a (box state). all dumpers will close to try keep as much heat inside the boiler as possible.

Now comes the scenario of starting the units up. Eskom is importing +_ 1000 MW from Cahora Bassa, + some diesel generation and a bit of hydro, that power will be sent to  

whatever power station Eskom decides to star first or maybe even two or three in order to feed the auxiliary equipment to start the boilers. Possibly the smaller stations such as Hendrina, Arnot, kendal and Komati.

Lots of power is needed to start the auxiliary plant. 

Water treatment plants will be the first to start, on the boiler side start the ID fans to purge all the gas in the furnace. Boiler will start firing using fuel oil. if the boiler is not completely cold the smaller units, withing +_ 4 hours will be fully on load, so an extra 200 MW, and so they will start next units and so and so. So in my opinion with 7 to 10 days the entire grid will be back online.