Johannesburg — IT WAS about 2am on a warm Highveld morning when Eskom transmission MD Jacob Maroga realised a crisis was looming.

One power station after another started to go down and in the next half hour Eskom lost about 1600MW from the system.

Then one of the units at Koeberg, SA's only nuclear power station, went down. Given that several power stations were out for scheduled maintenance, and that the reserve margin, or spare power that Eskom keeps for emergencies, was at a low 8%, Maroga was acutely aware that trouble lay ahead.

How right he was. Maroga swiftly assembled a small but high-ranking team and by 4am they had gathered to decide on how to manage the crisis. Eskom had lost more power than it had available in the system, so the options were limited. Blackouts were inevitable. Every two hours, a different area in the country was cut off and by 11am, Eskom was starting to restore power as stations started to come back on line.

Given that the response time of municipalities, which distribute much of the country's power to homes and businesses, tends to be slower, power was fully restored only towards the end of the day. That day was January 18.

The events of January 18 will serve as an important lesson for Eskom. Critically, the utility must learn that, in its attempts to placate concerned users, it should not promise what it cannot deliver.

When faced with rolling blackouts in Western Cape last year, Eskom promised these would not spread to the rest of SA but if demand continues to grow at its present pace, Eskom simply will not be able to keep that promise this winter. With a reserve margin of 8%, Eskom is stretched.

Another lesson is the importance of communication. Inevitably, there was a hue and cry among residential, business and industrial customers when the power went out on January 18. It is difficult to test the veracity of predictions from business organisations that the cuts cost the economy hundreds of millions of rand, but it is obvious that blackouts affect many businesses. Nevertheless, these predictions irritated Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, who dismissed them as "utter garbage".

Equally, the rather disingenuous comment from Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin that he was confident the entire country would not be plunged into darkness did little to help. Of course not. That would require every power station in the system to trip simultaneously, the chances of which are slim.

And while it is worth recording the reasons why we arrived at this situation -- if only to avoid a repeat of it in future -- we need to get past the blame game. It is well documented that government did not allow Eskom to build new power stations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the power utility started making noises that it was running out of excess capacity. Government did this because it wanted to liberalise the electricity market, unbundle Eskom and get the private sector to build the next generation of power stations. That strategy, which was in line with global trends and was widely supported, was overturned in 2004 when government decided state-owned entities would drive infrastructure investment.

The point is that SA has an acute problem looming with its electricity supply. Eskom executives admitted as much in a briefing last week. Rather than ignoring the problem, or ridiculing concerns about it, it would be far more helpful if we faced up to the issue and communicated ways of dealing with it. Because, as CEO Thulani Gcabashe says, this is not Eskom's problem alone -- it's everyone's and the only way we are going to minimise the effect of power cuts is if there is a concerted effort to do so.

The next three years will be critical. It will take at least that long before the first unit of projects Alpha and Charlie -- the mega six-pack power station to be built in Limpopo -- comes on stream. Alpha and Charlie will be the first new base load stations to be constructed in SA for 20 years. In the interim, Eskom expects to deliver about 3500MW of power from mothballed plants and other sources, which is far less than is needed in the short term. There are other supply options, such as importing electricity. But, critically, there must be a huge push to get people to use less.

It will be hard to get South Africans to use less power as electricity has always been cheap and plentiful.

No longer. The real need is to reduce usage at peak times -- in the morning and evenings -- and that means residential consumers. Reduced and more efficient use is needed -- such as installing geyser blankets, solar heaters and compact fluorescent heating; turning geysers off when not in use; and limiting the use of underfloor heating.

What Eskom needs to achieve in a short time is a dramatic change in consumer behaviour.

It won't be easy and at the very least will need the buy-in of government and municipalities but in the short term, it's the only way to keep the lights burning.

--Chalmers is deputy editor.