With South Africa only weeks away from the start of winter, the head of the State owned Eskom warns there will be the worst blackouts on record, which is really something because some people are already going 10 – 12 hours a day without electricity at the moment.
The country is allegedly at Stage 6 blackouts with “Stage 8” appearing to be a near certainty (if not there already). But apparently they are making plans to invent a “Stage 16” just in case they need it.
“Luckily” South Africa may meet Climate Goals to cut emissions by 2030, though possibly destroy their civilization in the process.
SA may face power cuts of up to 32 hours, says Eskom
Johannesburg – South Africans should brace themselves for the possibility of being plunged into the worst darkness ever since the start of load shedding, as load shedding up to stage 16, meaning an unspecified 32 hours of power cuts, is anticipated to avert the total collapse of the grid owing to mounting demand.
A document titled “voluntary” NRS048-9 edition 3, which would in unforeseen emergency circumstances allow Eskom to implement drastic load shedding beyond stage 8, is currently being finalised by the National Regulatory Services Association of SA, a voluntary association assisting with regulating load shedding.
“Most municipalities and Eskom-supplied areas have adopted a two-hour load-shedding schedule. On a two-hour load-shedding schedule, you would expect to be off for 32 hours in a 32-hour period (under stage 16),” she said.
Not so reassuringly, the Eskom spokesperson said it would only be implemented “if there were emergencies threatening to collapse the grid, something that might be possible during winter.” She further maintained that the country was only at stage six blackouts and “doesn’t seem to be moving towards that direction of 16.” Thus confirming that they were thinking about it.
Unfortunately an energy expert said that things have been worse than stage six for a long time and Eskom just lie and call it “stage six” regardless.
Energy expert says Eskom lying to SA about load shedding, adds country already passed Stage 6 blackouts
See-Anne Rall, IOL
As more insurance companies are changing their policies regarding damage to items from load shedding, experts believe the country is teetering on the edge of a total blackout.
On Monday, Eskom announced the implementation of Stage 6 load shedding following the failure of two generating units. Eskom said breakdowns are currently at 18 016MW of generating capacity while the generating capacity out of service for planned maintenance is 3 987MW.
Group chief executive at the Whitford Group and energy expert, Adil Nchabeleng, said the country has technically moved beyond Stage 6 load shedding with some areas having no electricity for well over the hours as per Eskom’s load shedding schedule.
In an interview with “Morning Live“, Nchabeleng said Eskom was lying to the public. Nchabeleng said some areas go for up to 12 hours without electricity. “Half of the country, almost 80% of the country is without electricity at every given time,” he said.
Things are so bad, two years ago the government ordered in 1,220 megawatts of floating Turkish Karpowerships which will burn low sulpfur HFO, or “oil” as normal people would call it. Though apparently the ships will have to anchor off Mozambique, and run with some energy sharing export deal — because environmentalists didn’t like it and Eskom “demanded indemnity against any adverse outcomes from corruption allegations.” Life gets so complicated when corruption and green fantasies run rife.
Karpowership — runs on Natural Gas, LNG or Low Sulfur HFO.
In a kind of parody, when a small town spent $5m US to build their own 4.3MW solar farm they barely started operation when State owned Eskom took them to court and “won on a technicality” thus stopping the town from using their own solar-plant to reduce their own blackout times. So the solar plant produces nothing at times while the country is racked with an energy crisis. The script writers in Yes Minister didn’t even see this coming.
S.Africa’s Blackouts Force Solar-powered Town To Life In The Dark
In the ensuing case, Eskom argued that RFS had not been granted authorisation to carry out its own blackout programme.
The monopoly explained that Frankfort still needed to draw power from Eskom’s grid.
The town’s solar panels were not enough to cover its needs, and its system did not have batteries in which to store excess power and draw on it at time of need, it said.
Why? The town might set an example for other towns:
If the town were allowed to dispense with Eskom’s blackout schedule, others could follow suit, causing anarchic fluctuations in supply and demand that could cause the national grid collapse, the company contended.
“If the floodgates are thus opened, Eskom’s ability to ensure the safety of the grid… will be severely compromised,” it said in its affidavit.
So solar power is NOT the solution to an energy crisis. Tell the world, eh? Though possibly the real fear is that people might figure out their own solutions? Energy companies, no matter how crooked and badly run, really seem to own The People, and these poor businessmen sound pretty desperate.
“If they are not going to allow us to use the solar… or to use our own electricity, we don’t have any choice, we will have to take the law into our own hands,” warned Pretorius, who grows cereals and relies on electricity to power the irrigation system.
“It’s a matter of survival.”
Let’s not forget that fifty years ago South Africa built the Arnot Coal Power Station in just four years. The first power stations were built in South Africa in the 1920s but now, people are hot-rigging electricity substations to steal electricity, and there are estimates that as many as 50% of the customers in Soweto are illegally connected.
Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)
Control your climate with blackouts?
It’s hard to believe Bloomberg thought this was a good story. They see this as some kind of “success”, as if the megatons of carbon saved to pretend to reduce world temperatures by 0.0001 degrees Celcius in a hundred years made this kind of pain worthy:
Output of the climate-warming gases from the world’s 14th-biggest emitter is already falling even though its Nationally Determined Contribution, a target adopted by the cabinet in 2021, only forecast a decline from 2025.
“It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday. “We reckon we are well within the range” of meeting the 2030 target, he said.
Best wishes for our South African friends!
Thanks to Stephen Neil and Climate Depot
- South Africa unraveling: Army called in to protect coal plants, after sabotage, theft and 200 days of rolling blackouts
- South Africa faces blackouts, vandalism, protests and people in hospital from DIY electricity. Coal to run for longer.
- South Africa grid struggling with national rolling blackouts: Strikes, corruption and no respect for coal power
South Africa blackouts coming to a town near you Australia, signed blackout Bowen….bwahaha
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Albo and BoBo, what a team.
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Yes Minister
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So Bloomberg believe taking your country back to the stone age to “save the world” is to be admired. Admired to such an extent that the rich countries will give you a lousy $8.5 billion which might buy a small nuke or some useless windmills. Then we are talking about South Africa where the government has allowed this catastrophe and where corruption is rife so expect that there will be no new power stations but some very wealthy politicians and bureaucrats.
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Ah yes, its all about ‘WHO’ gets the $8500,000,000.. that will not be the people lighting candles and cooking on a wood fire while wrapped in blankets. If one or two individuals in power here in Aussie were offered that much money I’m sure there would be takers in the halls of Parliament!
So it seems the West, basically America, is printing money to pay poorer countries to collapse their advancement.
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$8.5 B is a small price to pay to keep a country subservient. But China ain’t going away.
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Bloomberg should move all its staff and operations to South Africa to benefit from the wonderful conditions there…
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The science, the engineering costings, the basics of Generating and distributing electricity to homes and businesses is available and beyond question.
The current situation world wide has nothing to do with the capacity to provide cheap, reliable electricity; it’s completely and absolutely a function of Intent and the obvious direction we are heading is clearly illustrated by regions of the USA and Once Great Britain where everything that has been built and worked for over centuries has been smashed and sent to the dump.
Electricity makes society functional, comfortable and efficient and the Elites who now rule the world won’t allow that to continue.
The Intent is to create so many threats that we keep hopping from one foot to the other and are too distracted to see the real problem.
We must acknowledge and fix the true problem and it’s not electricity.
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“The current situation has nothing to do with the capacity to provide cheap, reliable electricity”. You are so right Keith.
The truth is, it is all about the green’s ideology. They don’t give a toss about the consequences of shutting down our grid so long as they achieve their ridiculous and destructive aims of ‘carbon emissions’ and ‘nett zero’.
How the Australian people continue to support successive governments with this ideology beats me. Has to be brainwashed or just braindead . .
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No Geoffrey. You do not understand the Greens at all. They are not in the least interested in or worried about the environment but simply use it to gather in the useful idiots to help them achieve their real goal which is the total destruction of democracy as we know it and the installation of a world wide communist government. The greenest “government” in the world is the European Union. It elects members from the participating states but they have no real power. Power is held by an unelected bunch of bureaucrats who merely take advice from the assembly but tend to ignore it. It is the EU who have instituted the most draconian measures to combat climate change and in the process outsourced even the German car industry to China because they have made reliable energy so expensive. It was the communist Merkel who allowed the millions of illiterate Muslims to infest Europe as refugees, a programme that is still taking place. Look at the EU reaction to Orban in Hungary having the temerity to build a wall to keep the refugees out. No Geoffrey. It is all designed to help the communists back into power everywhere even here.
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On the contrary Lawrie, I understand the greens very well !!
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In the beginning when the ‘unsustainable’ energy systems are established its a destroy the environment (flora & fauna) to save the planet scenario. Its clear then that this strategy (or plan) ultimately morphs into a destroy the humans end game! What choices are there for the masses? Prepare, protest or perish.
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There is now talk of shutting down entire wind farms during bat and bird activity and migration, perhaps months at a time, that’ll put a crimp in their bottom lines.
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No it wont. I can just about guarantee the taxpayer will be footing the bill while they have to stop the bird/bat mincers turning
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Almost certainly getting more income than when they are actually providing their pittance to the grid.
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Yes, the subsidy farmers won’t want to forego any income on those rare occasions when the windmills could be turning but aren’t due to wildlife conservation issues.
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More than talk it was a condition of approval for the Robbins Island wind farm project.
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Maybe we could stop some inland wind farms with them being in the flyways of the wandering crow, another endangered species. The increase of carcasses under wind turbines must surely be hazardous by tempting carrion eaters. Just remember that the climate warriors are not interested in the environment at all and the deaths of species is just a byproduct of destroying our energy supply.
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Part of the issue is a failure to properly (or at all) perform maintenance on the coal power stations plus other issues such as corruption and incompetence leading to coal deliveries which contained sand, rocks or high sulphur content which damages boiler tubes. Typical problems that are well documented throughout all of Africa.
SEE LINKS FOR REST
Fortunately, I believe South Africa’s nuclear reactors are run by European contractors and properly managed. However, these only supply 5% of the power.
South Africa’s power system worked perfectly well until 1994. It is a testament to the robustness of coal power stations that they have survived at all since that time with inadequate, little or no maintenance.
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David that date of 1994 is also when Nelson Mandela was elected President of Sth Africa and everything started to rapidly deteriorate.
BTW I’d like to follow that recent gift of 8 billion $ and find out where it ended up.
How the wealthiest country in Africa could descend so fast is mind boggling and ditto the mess and poverty in today’s Zimbabwe.
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To undertake and report that audit is the modern equivalent of a suicide note. You would be uninsured.
Haven’t you heard of ‘Arkanicide’ or about say for instance;
the Shermans
or Assange
or even this chap stuck in NZ.
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Eskom supply Namibia and some other [snip], there is an end user agreement so SA take the load shedding to keep supply to the end users, thats how it was when I worked at a smelter in Namibia 10 years ago.
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” a testament to the robustness of coal power stations that they have survived at all since that time with inadequate, little or no maintenance.”
But obviously not KP.. One of the first questions I used to be asked was “Yah man, but is it kaffir-proof”
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…coal deliveries which contained sand, rocks or high sulphur content …
Maintenance would have been easy/unnecessary if certain deliveries even CONTAINED coal!!
The corruption looting spree in Eskom was estimated at around R170 billion and was a talking point back in 2019 and no doubt most of the time after their monumentous event which gave their country its true “voice”.
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When reading about the parlours state of the Rainbow Nation remember that before the current “ government “ took over, South Africa generated 70% of all electricity on the whole African continent & did it very economically & efficiently not to mention 24 hours per day, 365.25 days per annum. What happened. The world insisted that the country would do far better being run by 3rd world idiots. That worked well didn’t it!
It’s not only the energy sector that’s knackered. I doubt you will find anything in the once great industrialised country that hasn’t ground to a halt or is in the process of grinding to a halt. The writings of the country’s future were burning brightly in 1989. Thank you Australia for giving me & my family a future in this currently wonderful country. Beware of people & their Voices for radical change or you’ll all be regretting such changes!!
I wonder if there are any foreign investors besides China wanting to move in? Give it another 3 / 6 months & the news about China’s involvement in South Africa will become apparent!
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But but, they have their voice, bit of a warning as to what our ‘voice’ may produce.
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Mine is a full blown warning! Say yes at your county’s peril. I speak from experience!
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There was a video recently of lorries loaded with high quality coal heading for a seaport. The column was tens of kilometres long as the good coal was being sold to alleviate the shortages in Europe and China over the NH winter. The poor quality coal was being used locally.
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South Efrica are so far behind, they are now ahead.
Flinders Island is at 89% diesel now @ 08:00, bless you Rudolf.
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I’ll see your 89% and raise it to 91% (785kW) as at 9:15, sings “Thank heaven for little diesels”.
Footnote: Sorry if you get cancelled because of this exposure Maurice – gender is not bin ary these days.
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Diesel now 92% as I type this.
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That’s about 22GW cut from supply – which is more than the entire of the Aus grid demand at 3am. Welcome back to the 15th century.
Of course this meets the CO2 reduction targets. “See, we told you it would work”.
For those who cannot understand why a large % of the Aus population refuses to understand what is happening, the answer lies squarely in the human characteristic of VANITY – people will never accept that they are so easily duped.
So a black start is needed to overcome that. SA is demonstrating this, with Eskom lying shamelessly. The Aus MSM is refusing to report it to maintain the “renewabubbles” fiction here. People are needlessly dying in huge distress but vanity requires that fact to be suppressed.
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“people will never accept that they are so easily duped”. What we are observing is a continual procession of “big lies”, mostly all provided by governments. I hate to draw a Nazi analogy but a comment of a description of the “big lie” is attributed to Mr Hitler. Basically, the bigger the lie the better, if it’s told by government or any group wanting to sway public opinion. Most people don’t want to accept that their government will tell them lies, so believe the porkies. The bigger lie the better. Then even when the lie is disproved as an untruth, those same people will refuse to accept they have been “duped”, as part of the VANITY complex. Whether it’s climate change or COVID policies we are continually being told a pack of big lies. The same with electricity generation where the present big lie is that solar/wind can provide dispatchable power at the cheapest cost. Which is actually 2 big lies joined together – a super lie.
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Goebbels
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While life expectancy has increased in all of Africa since 1994, South Africa has seen a rapid drop since then and the drop in the graph is incredible and only the last few years has seen the return to their life expectancy in 1994.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ZAF/south-africa/life-expectancy
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And while life expectancy seems to be ‘holding’, the general education level seems to be dropping. Many old-timers assert that the education (and the employment) was better in the Nationalist Party days of ‘white’ government!
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Lake Macquarie had a widespread blackout this week for an hour or two. Nobody knows why, but here’s a couple thoughts.
It was a cold, grey morning
Lidell is shut down
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So long as they switch off the Green/Teal seats first, then Labor seat.! 😉
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Nope, first to go ( if it’s in NSW) should be the ACT. But, I suspect that would never happen because of “national security concerns”, or something. They continually claim the ACT is running 100% on intermittents- let’s prove it.
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Or – it was an Ausgrid line fault.
I have been watching the AEMO Dashboard since the end of April for signs of system stress. The frequency of Lach of Reserve conditions in NSW have been lower this week than previously.
South Australia had a couple of spikes to $995/MWh through the night and it appears that the Murray Link has an issue.
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Statements like this are just lazy and rarely true
https://twitter.com/Ausgrid/status/1658598241946988550
you’re welcome
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So the Ausgrid site didn’t work. “nobody knows why”. Perhaps you saw (briefly) a more useful answer?
But a further tweet reply said: “Hello, the outage was caused by a high voltage fault. The fault has now been rectified. Thank you.”
Which tells us really nothing.
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It tells us that the input to the system is unstable and erratic.
This system was designed by politicians, not electrical engineers.
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Clearly the techs working on it know why.
It is the royal nobody which actually just refers to oneself.
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So what matters more, that a commenter on a blog was only 99.9% correct, or that the people in charge of our grid are honest and transparent?
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I don’t see that a lack of instant communication of the full details of an incident is evidence of a lack of transparency.
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Good. So get back to us when they give us reasons. Someone knows apparently what caused it, but they aren’t saying. It only takes a few minutes to tweet it out… When it’s “climate change” they tweet it out 7 months before it even happens. See last nights news.
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I understand, it’s very hard to see that sort of detail from Canberra.
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Sorry, but your pedantry is beyond my commenting abilities.
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“Clearly the techs working on it know why.”
Clearly you don’t, so why comment !
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South African winters can be bitterly cold.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-05-13-south-africas-cold-weather-has-arrived-some-tips-on-how-to-stay-warm-and-safe/
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Lovely photo of fat snowflakes wafting down onto Johannesburg’s streets Aug 2012, above the authors’ opening sentence: ‘Research shows that the world is undoubtedly warming.’
I once knew a woman, Di Chotomy.
Found https://www.snowreport.com.za a few years ago and enjoy their enthusiastic updates of snowfalls as well as their webcam links: some days, literally, snow for Africa! However, the two (2) ski areas there are presently “offline” – powerless (?). There’s snow and cold temperatures in the forecast for this weekend, brrrrrr…
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This link:
https://www.snowreport.co.za > webcams
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BTW life expectancy plunged soon after Mugabe was elected in Zimbabwe and today the country is a basket case.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ZWE/zimbabwe/life-expectancy
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Twitter user @k9_reaper vividly illustrates this drama in SA, especially about copper theft from the distribution system.
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Thanks. Good tip.
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” Rolling blackouts will continue to worsen for the next three years, after which they will cease to exist as there will be NO power at all.”
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There was a former South African, now Australian, Scott Balson, https://lovinglifetv.com/about-us/ , who had a YouTube channel called “Loving Life”.
He reported extensively on incompetence and corruption in South Africa, including at Eskom.
Unfortunately, telling the truth doesn’t fit with the Official Narrative of the Left and he was cancelled by YouTube about 2 or 3 years ago.
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Plan and budget for your grid secession now.
South Africa is just a few years ahead of the rest of the developed world. They have the world’s leading demand management system – you can find out when you will have power just by entering your post code. They were in Stage 6 yesterday but back out to Stage 4 or 5 now:
https://www.ourpower.co.za
South Africa has invested in wind and solar with 7GW now installed. So an increasing portion of what power is available comes from “renewables”.
South Africans who want reliable electricity make their own:
https://theconversation.com/south-africas-power-crisis-going-off-the-grid-works-for-the-wealthy-but-could-deepen-injustice-for-the-poor-200288
There are even guides to getting off grid:
https://businesstech.co.za/news/business-opinion/601186/a-step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-get-off-eskoms-grid-including-the-cost/
All developed countries with NetZero target and current thermal generation have socialised their electricity systems by banning the most economic option for their grids. Newly socialised grids will be unreliable and high cost to those who have to buy electricity rather than make their own.
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Yes. Actually most South Africans cant afford solar, only the rich. So what this means is that the people who could afford to pay their ESKOM power bills leave ESKOM, so it has fewer people who pay the bills, no revenue, no new power stations, more people leaving ESKOM = death spiral.
It is why I remain in South Africa, because it is just ahead of everybody else.
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South Africans are quite busy dismantling their own country such as by theft of copper power cables.
If there is no electricity distribution system, there is no need for power stations…
https://youtu.be/tB1MCJ4Xmqg
South Africa is destroying itself even faster than Australia is.
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It is just advancing a little faster than Australia toward NetZero. A world leader in the reduction of the demon gas CO2.
Australia has all the same de-industrialising policies in place. The degradation of the grid is just occurring a little faster in South Africa. Australia is yet to confirm it can make it through winter 2023 minus Liddell without active demand management. The NEM minus Eraring looms.
The difference between South Africa and Australia is that Australia exports a lot of its natural resources. And the demon carbon makes up a decent slice of that:
– thermal coal heading for AUD65bn in 22/23
– met coal made AUD72bn in 21/22
– NG forecast AUD91bn in 22/23
Australia will ride the NetZero wave for as long as it can avoid reality and China is prepared to supply all the required manufactured stuff to keep the western fantasy alive.
The fact that India, Indonesia and Australia have been invited to the G7 meeting in Hiroshima suggests that there may be some pressure to curb coal production.
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Always worth keeping in mind that Net Zero does not refer to the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere but the number of dollars / pounds / euros / pesos etc etc in either your bank account or wallet.
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“South Africa is destroying itself even faster than Australia is.”
And that really is an achievement!
I suspect that most Australians don’t fully understand just how far we are down the dunny.
The last forty years have been bad, but the COVID19 period saw a gear change that smashed hearts, homes, businesses, and our once great education system which is now totally stuffed.
We are so close to the end, but it’s hidden well by politicians and media in collaboration.
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KK. Stuffed by sociopath guvermints that don’t,(never did ) care a damn about
life chances, and by sheeples ”Do Not Disturb,’mentality – until the sheeple can no longer
look away because the distopean reality may no longer be ignored. Such is reality and it
BITES.
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Yes. The solar farms they build get raided, and the panels stolen nearly as fast as they put them up.
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Africa – Swahili for Dumbass
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Victoria has already experienced managed blackouts or “controlled outages” as the government spin doctors like to describe them. Happened on 28 Jan 2018, when during a period of high heat/low wind (ie Summer) there was a malfunction at a coal power plant and the state went “blacK” in a rotation of areas. Big power users were shut down (VIVA Energy, Alcoa etc) and the government (Lily D’Ambrosio/ Daniel Andrews) blamed the unreliability of coal for the predicament. Usual baseless waffle. It was only a day but a taste of things to come for the rest of Australia if we further deplete our coal/gas generation capacity.
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The Minister for CAGW & Energy Poverty, Chris “Einstein” Bowen, will stand up in parliament and declare — “If South Africa can do it, well God damn it, so can ‘Stralia!”…
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LOL. What more can you say?
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The rail link in South Africa between Johannesburg – main industrial heartland – and the largest container port Durban has been operating at 25% of capacity with the port exports almost coming to a standstill. During the past year 591km of cable have been stolen and the rail agency is even considering moving back to diesel engines but does not have enough. Crime, corruption and mismanagement have all contributed.
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