naschenweng.info

Eskom's service is generally up to shit (only Telkom is worse), and in my specific case I cancelled my Eskom account on the 7th September 2007 and have been impatiently waiting for the refund of my R 1,800 deposit.

It has been a long road: After 9 months, 4 different service calls, 48 calls (during which I spoke to 43 different people and managed to waste 8 hours of my time) Eskom finally managed to get my refund processed. This did not go smooth either as they decided to post me a cheque although in 13 calls I had to give them my banking details (which have been logged against those pesky service calls).

But today is my luck day - Nonhlanhla Shabalala, perhaps the only dedicated debit-controller at Eskom not just phoned me back after I sent Eskom head-office an email, she also personally resolved the issue and confirmed via phone that the refund will be processed within 7 days.

Perhaps Elton, Nomhale, Mercy, Nomzakaza, Gregory, Joyce and the other 36 people at Eskom's call-centres should learn from Nonhlanhla and actually do their job properly.

(For the math-geniuses: Interest lost on the above, had Eskom done the refund in time, would have been R 130,00)

Eskom's bizarre plans to increase tariffs in excess of 50% and even go as far as having consumers pay for previous consumption is short of criminal (and supported by the SA government). While many people believe that loadshedding and generators is a South African symptom, don't fool yourself.

Europe (especially Italy and France) and the US have similar supply problems. Those countries however do manage the supply problems by importing spare capacity, reducing the export of power or going for alternative power - such as California:

Southern California Edison is taking a different approach: instead of cluttering up the desert, the company plans to build a distributed solar array on the rooftops of commercial buildings throughout SoCal. The plan is to spend $875M over five years to cover about two square miles of rooftop with the panels, which will alleviate stress on the grid by generating around 250 megawatts of juice, as much as a small power plant. That's enough to light up 162,000 homes, but it's still a little short of the record 280-megawatt Solana installation planned in Arizona.

Makes you wonder into which (Eskom/government) pocket(s) those tariff increases will fall...