Unless you’re stuck in a crevice in the middle of nowhere you should know about the crisis that Cape Town and in fact the entire Western Cape is facing in the coming months; a crisis that is quite likely to stretch into years, as there certainly doesn’t appear to be any immediate “quick fix� solution to the problem at hand.

Early this morning Cape Town was plunged into darkness as Koeberg disconnected from the national grid and stopped generating electricity as its sole working reactor switched off for the second time in as many weeks. Go read the news if you don’t already know the details. Now we wait, and in the mean time we can expect our power to go out as “scheduled load-shedding� blackouts occur. The scheduled part is obviously a farce, my electricity has never gone off or come back online according to that schedule, and I’m sure there are many others with the same gripes; and the load-shedding part is just an annoying euphemism. So here I am saving everything every couple of minutes trying to minimise any damage incurred as a result of an unexpected blackout that is sure to happen at some point.

This last week has made me painfully aware of how reliant our society is on electricity and its constant supply. I used to complain about my unstable net connection, now I can’t even use that unstable net connection half the time with our electricity supply being what it is. Everything just comes to a sudden, jarring halt when the electricity is cut off; businesses shut down as their PCs switch off, traffic becomes gridlocked as the robots stop working and just gets worse when people begin to head for home unable to do anything at the office, food gets thrown out half cooked or spoiled as fridges warm up, and in general we get cruelly thrown back into the dark ages.

So if you haven’t already, my advice would be to stock up on wood and gas for the coming winter months, as it seems things are only going to get worse as demand increases. And demand is certainly increasing, as there are reports of gas shortages. A UPS is now like gold if you work in the IT industry, my boss bought 3 the other day and plans on buying a complete battery operated energy source, and possibly a diesel generator to keep this thing charged; but considering that our office is in a residential area I really don’t think that idea will fly. The noise will be sure to attract complaints and I’m pretty sure the sound will grate on my nerves too, like the damn power supply fan of the server sitting behind me… I’m going to smash this thing into millions of tiny bits soon.

In this case I think people are placing too much blame on Eskom and not enough blame where it is due. The government has let them retain their monopoly as seems to be a very unfortunate yet common trend in this country. Faults occur and problems rear their ugly heads, this is unavoidable fact of life and is quite understandable but in this case where there is almost no backup to be had, the result is that the outlook on the whole situation has become somewhat dismal.

The council has known for many years that the electricity demand would reach critical mass and start to exceed supply sometime around now, and with Koeberg offline this is exactly what has occurred and much like our water supply they’ve done nothing to solve the problem. In the case of our water supply they’ve known for a lot longer, the Cape is in drought and has been for over a decade (it was 17 years if I recall correctly) and yet nothing has been done, apart from imposing heavy restrictions and praying for rain. I really don’t mind the restrictions; in fact I abhor the wastage of water as I find it completely unnecessary, unfortunately the fact of the matter is that imposing water restrictions on the domestic market is only going to help slightly, as it’s industries that use a very large portion of our limited water supply. It’s like slapping a band-aid on a gaping wound, the little help that it’s going to provide isn’t going to last very long.