In the previous article (for those of you foolish enough not to have read it), I wrote how I went to work for State-owned electricity utility Eskom as senior engineer for operations in 1988. It was an incredibly fortunate time; Eskom had just changed from being a single monolithic organisation with a head branch to one with five sub-branches, one in each province.

Each branch had a separate GM and far more empowerment than before. In addition, there was a new management style – branches could, within limits, set their own salaries and their own style of operating. All this was assisted by a set of new control systems.

The MD of all this set out a whole series of guidelines, all based on a philosophy of ‘MSP’, which stood for ‘Mission, Strategy and Philosophy’. Eskom employees at each branch soon translated this as ‘Meetings, Seminars and Parties’. To continue …

The MSPs seemed healthy enough but, in point of fact, worked out as many Eskom departments setting up meetings which were away from their home base, and which lasted a day or two, after which there was a day or two of parties. The seminars were the same as the meetings – only some training company was invited in to provide one- or two-day instruction, followed by the obligatory party.

Given that Eskom, at the time, was paying one-and-a-half to two times normal local salaries and that it had a great medical aid scheme and great fringe benefits, working for Eskom was a very sweet life indeed. The fact was, despite the benefits and the great salaries, Eskom set the standards of performance very high. In the operations department (of which I was second in charge) one of our performance standard requirements was to have no power outages lasting longer than a given time in a given period; for example, an 11 000 V power line supplying a town 100 km away was required to have no more than 12 accidental power outages (that is, outages caused by power failure or lightning strike, for example) in a year. There were different standards for different power outages from 11 kV (11 000 V) to 400 kV.

In general, the regional Eskom branches did not have any control over systems above 132 kV. Eastern Cape, where I was based, was an exception. The local branch controlled up to 220 kV. Into each branch of sunshine, a little rain must fall, and in the Eastern Cape “my branch of rain” was the 220 kV supply system. There was only one 220 kV supply system connected to East London and the surrounding region and, if it went off, the 132 kV and 66 kV supply systems could not carry the full load. Thus, the loss of the 220 kV supply system could result in a large power outage in the Eastern Cape.

I was in charge of a large control centre which had a manager and a number of operators who kept a view on all possible power outages, real or anticipated, and took appropriate action by means of remote control where required. The thing we did not need was for these valuable and skilled operators, or myself, to attend parties or seminars, when we could be keeping the power system up to standard.

Those people running the training department wanted to increase the value and importance of the training department and consequently forced our staff to go on as many spurious training seminars as they could. This did not assist us to keep the power system going (which I believe should have been the primary intention) but we managed to overcome the additional work requirements by just paying overtime to all the staff to attend the meetings, seminars and parties when required.

This resulted in phenomenal incomes for some of the staff, but I felt it worth having in order to keep the power system going. However, the 220 kV supply system suffered a sudden increase in load caused by an unexpected source. Things were about to change; some good, some bad. See next week.