At 4am on January 18, 2007, the Eskom top brass huddled in a room for an emergency meeting that would change South Africa forever. The utility was running perilously short of electricity. In the week before, there had been unplanned outages at Camden, Matimba, Majuba, Kriel and Tutuka power stations. By the time of the meeting of the Emergency Command Response Centre, 5GW was offline, or about 15% of the system. At 8am, Eskom reduced the electricity supply to its large customers.
On St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, Eskom appeared before Parliament to explain what had happened and used the word “load