Johannesburg - Load shedding is costing South African companies billions. The Reserve Bank said South Africa’s electricity crisis is costing the economy as much as R899 million per day.
Dis-Chem said it spent R36 million on diesel over a 6-month period to keep its stores running. Pick n Pay said it spent R60 million a month on diesel, and Sandton City has reported the cost of Stage 6 load shedding to be R64 000 per hour.
The financial impact is significant, especially for smaller businesses that are either closing down or barely making ends meet, and there remains a growing concern that the grid will collapse completely, which has made many companies turn to more sustainable, long-term solutions to ensure they stay up and running no matter what.
Head of Division at Nymbis Cloud Solutions, Barry Kemp, said keeping the lights on, ensuring that the generator has diesel, managing IT equipment, managing and maintaining a UPS, and having the right people in place to handle all these load shedding fail-safes are time-consuming and expensive.
“Right now, for most companies, the biggest cost is diesel. An average 5KVaa diesel generator starts at around R250 000, and runs maybe five full racks of servers, and the diesel powering that for eight hours a day, 365 days a year, is around R650 000. This means that the average business has to spend R1 million to manage their own environment,” he said.
Kemp said the return on the R650 000 investment is tenuous, beyond just staying in business, which makes the most important business question not “How do I afford a generator” but “How do I make this someone else’s problem?” It makes sense to find a service provider that can take on the cost of keeping IT infrastructure running for a fraction of the price and take on the costs of manpower and maintenance.
“Many companies are not seeing the holistic costs of taking on the burden of power generation themselves. There is immense value in outsourcing this to a service provider. It’s the difference between spending upwards of a million a year and spending only R30,000 a month and knowing that the business always has access to reliable energy,” Kemp added.
Power reliability has become a commodity. The load shedding schedule over the past few weeks has doggedly insisted on being Stage 6 but has actually been a lot closer to Stage 8, putting immense pressure on organisations to find alternative power solutions that will ensure their IT equipment can withstand long periods of time without access to the grid.
As the country faces increasingly challenging times ahead – the problem of Eskom isn’t going to be solved at speed – companies need solutions that shift the cost burden and that allow them to remain competitive on the global stage.
“Moving infrastructure across to a co-location facility that takes on the burden of power, maintenance, service provision, and management means that the company not only saves a significant amount of money upfront but that they now open their doors to remote and hybrid working flexibility,” said Kemp.
The price tag that comes with self-generating power is hefty, and companies are struggling, both on the financial and infrastructural fronts.