Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricity Crisis

Re:Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricit... by jzwinck on Thursday March 17, 2016 @07:04PM (#11308376)

Nepal calls it load shedding too. In practice it's fairly counterproductive there. People buy banks of car batteries and inverters to store power when it's available and use it later. So they use as much power as before, with the added benefit of tons of hazardous waste from all the equipment at each building. Which of course they just throw into piles of broken stuff.

Does the same happen in South Africa?

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Re:Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricit... by nickik on Saturday March 19, 2016 @06:35AM (#11318010)

Its very typical and not just for power. It happens with water as well.

The pattern is simular, unstable supply leads to private infrastructure. Demand increases when supply is available, leading to more instablilty. Quality goes down because private infrastructure is usually second rate.

In egypt water quality is way down because of private storage in water tanks.

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Re:Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricit... by zo1 on Friday March 18, 2016 @11:19AM (#11312332)

When load-shedding "Season" happens, which we had recently, yes. Everyone wants to protect themselves, so a lot of people buy inverters + battery packs, or diesel/petrol generators.

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