Life in South Africa is full of frustrations, but probably the one that received most attention during 2023 was loadshedding, defined as "the interruption of an electricity supply to avoid excessive load on the generating plant". A couple of days ago I read that we had 335 days of loadshedding last year. That's right, only 30 days of uninterrupted power!!
Somehow the powers that be managed to keep the lights on over the Christmas and New Year period, but now the party's over. With the year less than a day old, it was announced that loadshedding would return from 5am on 2 January. At time of writing the lights have just come on after my first scheduled power cut of the year - a cut that lasted about 2¼ hours. It's my only one for today, but I'm scheduled for two such cuts tomorrow. And those are good days. When things get bad we can be kept in the dark for over 10 hours per day broken into sessions of 2½ or 4½ hours.
And that's just scheduled power cuts. Sometimes things go badly wrong and power doesn't return when loadshedding ends. In early December I had a power failure which lasted 26 hours. Some people have had to endure much worse.
My photo for the day is a tribute to loadshedding - a light with only one special bulb burning. For dramatic effect, I inverted it so that the bulb that's burning is black and the rest of them are white.
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