INSIDE ESKOM'S CONTROL ROOM

Isabel Fick runs the team tasked with managing the country’s loadshedding schedules and ensuring the grid doesn’t collapse

- LESEGO SEOKWANG

HOW many electrical engineers does it take to keep South Africa’s lights on? 

It’s not a trick question or a joke – the short answer is six.

And those six engineers play an important role. They’re the ones who run the main control room at the Eskom National Control Centre in Germiston, Gauteng. In other words, they’re the people who make sure loadshedding schedules run according to plan and that we don’t get plunged into perpetual darkness.

For 12 hours a day they each monitor and control how loadshedding rolls out across the country to ensure things run smoothly. Then a new six-person team arrives to start their 12-hour shift, explains Isabel Fick, the general manager of Eskom’s system controls team.

“What we do is balance supply and demand on the network,” Isabel tells YOU.

We’re chatting to her at the heart of loadshedding operations and she shares how things work behind the scenes to ensure there’s not a total collapse of the grid, which would be catastrophic.

Isabel’s team is responsible for making sure that when the lights go out, they also come back on again.

“The system is updated every four seconds. We have different desks where we monitor supply and demand.

“When it’s not in balance, that’s our indicator of things going wrong,” she explains.

Even though loadshedding is executed at municipal level, the control room is where the decision to implement it is made and where the stages are determined.

The team is, of course, bigger than just the six people manning the desks at the main centre.