Global Courant 2023-05-31 10:35:35
South Africa’s central bank is working on a contingency plan to ensure the country’s payment system remains operational if the country’s power grid collapses, Bloomberg reported.
The South African Reserve Bank and other financial market regulators, including the operator of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), are working on the strategy to close and reopen markets in an orderly manner, Deputy Governor Kuben Naidoo said Monday.
“All that work is ongoing and we are working quite closely with the telecommunications sector, with diesel suppliers, the payment sector of the banks and retailers to make sure that we can progressively build resilience in the financial sector,” he said in Johannesburg on Monday. .
Concerns about the country’s reliable power supply have increased as Eskom warned it would need to intensify power cuts during the winter months to protect the power grid from a complete collapse.
South Africa is experiencing unprecedented levels of load outages in 2023, and the energy company is struggling to meet electricity demand, leaving the country in darkness for as much as 12 hours a day.
In fact, this year’s electricity purchases just exceed the overall total for 2022.
According to the SARB’s latest stability assessment, which looks over the past few years, load shedding has increased fivefold (4.7x times) between 2021 and 2022 measured in Gigawatt-hours, and the Gigawatt-hour load in 2022 totaled 11,679 GWh.
So far in 2023, as of May 21, we have lost about 13,000 GWh, confirming that more GWh have been lost in the first five months of 2023 than in all of 2022.
While a total collapse of the system is unlikely, it is not impossible, Naidoo said. He said that the financial sector is doing everything it can to prevent chaos and panic and to increase the resilience of the system.
“If you had asked me a month ago, I probably would have said that in the event of a complete grid shutdown, there would be almost no transactions,” Naidoo said. “Thanks to technology and some planning, we might be able to get some transactions done and we might be able to have some functionality in the system, even if it’s just for a short period of time.”
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