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R/£ Spot those power gobblers
October 17, 2007 Edition 1
My sympathies to all fellow load-shedders who Eskom treats like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed copious loads of deceptively patriotic manure.
Now I'm all for saving as much electricity as possible by switching off the geyser, installing compact-fluorescent light bulbs and other save-energy-in-the-home ideas.
We have a crisis on our hands, and it's too easy to blame Eskom alone. Every South African needs to use electricity wisely - not just to avoid blackouts, but because we have a wider international role to protect the world from global climate change and harmful levels of air pollution.
Our electricity is among the cheapest in the world. The nation produces 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet makes up less than 0.8% of the world population. But it is very misleading to talk collectively about "us" or "we", because some South Africans use vastly more electricity than others. In fact, much of our power is not used by South Africans at all - but by multinational industries, which remit profits to shareholders overseas.
This is not a unique situation. Most countries fall over themselves to woo foreign investors. The point, however, is that when a country faces a major electricity crisis one would expect the government to discourage more energy-intensive foreign investment until the crisis is resolved. Yet it's still business as usual here.
Which is why Eskom's selective load-shedding and energy-saving campaign smacks of hitting soft targets rather than profligate users.
It's all very well asking Joe Citizen to curb electricity use in the national interest, but I've yet to see serious attempts by Eskom to target big-industry holy cows, which gobble the largest chunks of South African electricity.
Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger assured me some large industries also "took a big hit" during the latest bout of load-shedding last week. Though he had no detailed statistics to hand, Etzinger said one example was the BHP Billiton aluminium group, which apparently cut production by 50% to 90% for part of last week.
Finding reliable data on SA electricity consumption is tricky, but National Electricity Regulator statistics suggest that the residential sector (you and I) use 17% to 19% of the total. By contrast, heavy industry uses 60%, with the remainder going to the commercial farming and transport.
The environmental group Earthlife Africa alerted me to the presence of a very influential group of industrial holy cows known as the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG).
This powerful lobby group has 25 members who collectively use 40% of SA's electricity. It was set up in 1999 to ensure "internationally competitive" (read cheap) prices for members. Unfortunately, its website seems to be on the blink, its Rivonia telephone number rang unanswered yesterday and I was unable to reach the EUIG chairman or deputy chairman at Anglo HQ before deadline.
But I think it would be very illuminating to identify them and find out what contribution they made to load-shedding over the past year - before we are forced to swallow nuclear power at their behest.
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