So you have an energy crisis?

In South Africa we are in the midst of an energy crisis. There are quite a few arguments as to how we ended up here and lots of finger pointing. Simply put, the only supplier cannot supply enough electricity because they cannot generate enough. So I now know what it was like in California a couple of years back with the rolling blackouts they experienced.

Every time we have a run of ("planned") outages, folks run out to buy generators, batteries, torches, gas canisters etc. We are well past the "early" adopters, but none the less the retailers experience surges in turnover and are at times caught unawares.

What has come out of this is that the energy crisis extends beyond electricity. LPG gas until recently (last 5 years) was the exclusive domain of the poor and the caravan and holiday house owners. With the increased demand there is not enough LPG and certainly not enough retailers. Demand exceeds supply by quite a bit and often the big refineries cannot produce enough.

Which leads to the petrol and diesel prices. Who would have thought that an increasing petrol price would have been surpassed by a demand driven diesel price. With the increase in a available diesel vehicles in South Africa, the pressure on petrol prices and an improvement in service cycles due to more refined diesel the diesel price has shot passed petrol prices (the benefit of diesel vehicles is they are still more economical per litre than petrol ones).

So, that has to be an emphatic YES to an energy crisis.