Tag Archives: load shedding

Why is there Load Shedding at night (if we have plenty of extra capacity)

I was asked this as a followup on MyBB to my previous post about EV Cars and Load Shedding at night.

It’s a great question.

Why is there load shedding at night?

Eskom has a generation capacity of roughly 45GW in total.
Due to decades of neglect, horrifically bad decision making, and outright theft in some cases, this generation capacity is now closer to 30GW; sometimes even less.

What does generation capacity have to do with anything though?

This is easily answered by looking at demand. Sigh, I hear you say. What’s demand?

Demand is the counterpart to capacity. Demand is the amount of power we need to supply at a given time point.
Luckily this is fairly predictable on a daily weekly or monthly basis, and usually measured for time periods between daytime, evening and night.

Continue reading

Feasibility of Electric Cars in a Load Shed SA

One thing I’ve continually had to refute is whether we could support EV’s on Eskom’s grid in South Africa.
Yes, even with our current load shedding woes, it won’t be an issue, has long been my answer.

So, with that in mind, let’s put my money where my mouth is, and do some basic math to prove this.

I’ll start – let’s hand wave, and convert 500,000 cars to EV.

500,000 EV’s – woohoo! Go SA. 

To work out how much extra power is going to be needed by Eskom, we first need to work out a few things. Assumptions are a good thing to start with, so let’s make some of those..

As I’ve stated previously (and if you look at some of my previous posts, referenced with data), the average car journey in SA is 40km/day. Let’s use that as our first assumption.

Continue reading

I have the power! (Ripple Control, and load shedding in power systems)

Screen-Shot-2013-05-26-at-2.59.04-PM
As I have a vested interest in consistent electricity back home (see my other recent post on Solar for details) and have been in discussion with the council about net metering and grid tie, I’ve been doing quite a bit of random reading regarding electricity distribution and its various facets. Continue reading