Stage six black-out and it is time to panic! Our Council is living in the past and doesn’t have a clue how to deal with our electricity disaster.
This is not an opinion. It is a fair interpretation of the facts and one needs to go no further than the Council’s own Integrated Development Plan to see the detachment from reality.
The Council’s website (www.knysna@gov.za) provides a link to the IDP draft five- year plan for the years for 2023 to 2028 and there you will find among the “Important Documents” the introductory blurb that leaves no one in doubt that this is the core of the municipal plan for the future. We quote:
“The Integrated Development Plan (IDP) is a five-year plan which local government is required to compile to determine the development needs of the municipality. The projects within the IDP are also linked to the municipality’s budget. The municipality operates in a constantly changing environment and the IDP is reviewed annually ….”
Anually! Really? The most important section of the IDP is the electricity plan because load shedding has taught us that without electricity we are back in the cold dark world of the 19th Century.
The Executive Summary of the Master plan for Knysna’s “medium voltage electrical network” explains “This is update No 4 and the previous update was in August 2014, some five years ago”.
Odd! So we check the date of the “new” document and it is June, 2019. That was four years ago and a lot has happened since then.
On page 2 of the Executive Summary we find a paragraph that will blow your socks off. It starts: “It should not be a problem for Eskom to meet the increased demand for the next ten (10) years …”
How wrong can you be? How detached from reality can the councillors and staff be?
The consulting engineers who compiled the report state clearly that we are reading a 2019 update of a 2014 plan which was the third update of an earlier plan.
But here we have the Knysna municipality happily presenting the totally obsolete report as part of their 2023/28 plan for the future.
It should now be clear why our description of the Knysna Municipality’s detachment from reality was a fair interpretation of its dealings with the world and our future.
Is it possible to sue them all for negligence?
By the way, the report from 2019 (or 2014) did advise the municipality to take cognisance of “embedded generation” which was going to impact on the electricity supply. That was polite consulting engineer language for “roof-top solar is coming and you had better get your act together or your customers will all go off grid!”
Too late! It’s happening.