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Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robert b furman who wrote (4466)	4/14/2020 6:45:23 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13803

Hi Bob, I didn't reply to this one. South Africa is part of the Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP). It was created ruing apartheid when S. Africa (SA) was under embargo. As SA does not have oil nor gas but lots of coal. ESKOM, the SA electricity utility, it built a huge coal power capacity. The northern countries, in the other hand, have lots of hydroelectricity capacity and the SAPP complemented each other. The northern neighbors were in bad shape: Mozambique and Angola in civil war. Zimbabwe shooting itself on the foot under Robert Mugabe... All he members were happy with buying electricity from the coal fired power plants from SA and resell in their own markets. And so it went. ESKOM Then Apartheid ended and ESKOM fired all the whites and put the blacks in management positions. Away went the engineering and managerial capacity. But the coal mines were put in the hands of back people too. ESKOM bought coal from coal mines and we saw the rise of what is called coal barons. The fat cats that sold coal to ESKOM and everybody was happy. Without no one to oversee it. The coal barons in cahoots with ESKOM sold bad coal to it and the plants started having need for more maintenance. But there was no maintenance. The coal fired plants started deteriorating while the consumption kept increasing. With a deficit of energy, the neighbors could no longer count with the SA electrify and started suffering too. On top of that, bankers started being reluctant to loan money for coal sector, Mines, new plants and to refurbish the old ones. Perfect Storm started forming. Note that the African had been getting projects from Sugar Daddy China and thought that these Chinese, friends of all weather, would keep pumping money like it was pre/2008 financial crisis. They were wrong. The Chinese started pulling out. Now if you look to the SADC, you can see the installed capacity and only a fraction of that capacity is producing. The rest is in bad shape. Cannot produce. The neighbors that had hydropower, started mismanaging the hydric resources, using all the water available in the dams to generate [power to compensate for the SA deficit, If you do this, at the slightest variation in rainfall can make your dams dry and there goes your hydro generation capacity. And that has happened with the normal alternations of El Nino and La Nina years that wreaks havoc with the southern hemisphere weather. Of course these are normal events. Only they have been portrayed as Climate Change BS...