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.
