Of the countries studied, India fared the poorest. In our recent research on readiness for remote work, in light of lockdowns worldwide, we scored 42 countries on several crucial dimensions: the robustness of key platforms essential to business continuity (technology-mediated remote work, e-commerce, digital media, and digital foundations) the proliferation of digital payments to facilitate transactions and the resilience of internet infrastructure to traffic surges. India’s state of readiness for socially distant work and business continuity leaves much to be desired. A phased reopening at the end of May has left the country in the difficult position of fielding a large and growing outbreak while its fragile healthcare system is being pushed to the brink. India’s already precarious economic situation at the start of 2020-hobbled as the country was by a combination of lagged knock-on effects of ill-conceived policies like demonetization and a lack of bold ideas in planning for the future-was only exacerbated by one of the most stringent global lockdowns in the second half of March, which brought the economy to a virtual standstill and put over a fourth of the labor force out of work. As of this writing, the novel coronavirus has infected 10 million people globally, claimed the lives of nearly 500,000, and impacted the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, as countries struggle with the grim calculus involved in protecting both public health and economic health. Just R20 for the first month.The “great lockdown” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the global economy into the worst economic downturn since the great depression. Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. We appeal to all energy users to conserve electricity, particularly during the peak hours of 5pm until 10pm,” he said. I have received many reports of street lights on during the day and office buildings with all lights burning all night. “The outlook for load-shedding is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but we appeal to South Africans to continue to conserve electricity. He said design modifications had been completed to improve the performance of Medupi units 1, 2 and 3.Ĭonfirming they had identified parcels of land with existing grid access spread across several provinces, De Ruyter said the power utility had been in high-level government meetings over the weekend which would hopefully “accelerate” solutions to bring more capacity to the grid.ĭe Ruyter welcomed the announcement of a police task force to address sabotage and criminal activity at Eskom. President Cyril Ramaphosa said earlier on Monday that Eskom had made land available next to existing power stations for private investment in renewable energy projects.
“However, the risks remain because of the unpredictability and unreliability of the system,” he said. Oberholzer said Eskom hopes to lift the current round of load-shedding in 10 days’ time. During the night, when demand is lower, we will top up the dams and diesel,” he said. We recovered our emergency dam and diesel levels, however we will use these during the week when required. Some units will return over the next two days and will contribute to additional capacity. “Since July 3 we had 13 generators shut down because of defects and failures. Oberholzer said they have four generators out of service due to boiler tube leaks but the units are expected back during the week. Koeberg unit 2 has further been delayed and is only expected to return by the end of the month,” he said. “No routine maintenance was performed at these stations during the strike. He said the lack of operating and maintenance staff during the strike resulted in inadequate essential maintenance “The loss in capacity was as a result of the industrial action and due to no routine maintenance being performed, a lack of timeous breakdown repairs, a lack of maintenance and operating personnel as well as a lack of unit controllers to control normal functioning of the power stations,” he said. It will therefore take a number of weeks to fully recover,” he said.Įskom COO Jan Oberholzer said six power stations were directly affected by the strike.
“Unfortunately due to the unlawful strike, we have suffered significant backlogs in maintenance, and we had to operate plants under conditions which are less than ideal.
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