Room 101, in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love where prisoners are subjected to their own worst nightmare, fear or phobia. Here is praying that you do not suffer from nyctophobia, the fear of darkness, or that, if you do, you are not reliant on Eskom.

If you need reminding, Eskom is the acronym for the Electricity Supply Commission. If the ‘k’ confuses you, it was incorporated from the Afrikaans Kommissie. Eskom, established in terms of the Electricity Act of 1922, is due to celebrate its centenary on March 1, 2023. How many candles will be lit to celebrate this milestone?

Winter is around the corner. If you want to mark it on your calendar, it is set to start on June 1 and end on August 31. On April 19, an Eskom official was quoted as saying: “Today we are struggling to achieve the lower level of unplanned [breakdowns] that we desire, and it progressively increases to 37 days for winter and in the extreme could be as high 101 days, but that is clearly very far in the extreme. So, we have to redouble our efforts to contain the unplanned generation losses.” Does that mean that Eskom will be burning the candle at both ends?

Regular readers might recall that there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who cannot. Winter this year is set to last 91 days.

The announcement came only 18 days before Eskom’s 2022/23 tariff increase of 9.61% came into effect, which is less than half the 20.5% the utility had requested from the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa). When the tariff increase was announced on February 24, an Eskom official stated: “The financial implications of this decision on Eskom’s long-term sustainability will need to be further understood. “It is understood that Nersa considered the impact on consumers and the financial sustainability of Eskom as it made its decision.” Worryingly, the official added that Eskom would “deliberate further” as to how to “continue to sustainably provide electricity to the extent possible in the context of this revenue decision”.

To put Eskom’s electricity tariff increases into perspective, www.poweroptimal.com calculated that from 2007 to 2019 tariffs increased by 446%, while inflation was 98%. In other words, tariffs increased more than fourfold over 12 years. It calculated that the total increase in tariffs from 2007 to 2021 was 520%.

How did we get here? A www.biznews.com article that was published on July 5, 2021, and was titled ‘Dark history: The real reason behind load-shedding in SA’ offers a few insights: “South Africa has experienced load-shedding since 2007 because the country failed to build new power stations to keep up with economic growth and replace ageing generation plants. Between 1961 and 1991, Eskom completed 14 new power stations with an installed capacity of 35 804 MW. Over the next 30 years, between 1991 and 2021, Eskom only completed one new power station, Majuba, with an installed capacity of 4110 MW. On February 27, 2020, Cape Talk cited Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, as saying: “The crisis of Eskom can only be placed, honestly, on the decisions of Presidents Mbeki and Mandela in 1997, when they refused to invest in infrastructure that was collapsing at that time. “They were warned by executives that, if you don’t invest in infrastructure, you’ll see the first load-shedding in ten years. Blaming everything on Zuma is a very nice way of escaping responsibility.”

Only one power station built since 1994. We haven’t done any better in terms of dams. What is the word for the water equivalent of load-shedding? We may need it sooner or later.