One hundred days of nearly continuous load shedding
South Africa is approaching 100 days of rolling blackouts, the longest period yet, with more to come as the country's electrical situation worsens. According to Bloomberg estimates, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned corporation that provides virtually all of the energy in Africa's most industrialised economy, has enforced daily blackouts since Oct. 31, making Monday
One hundred days of nearly continuous load shedding
South Africa is approaching 100 days of rolling blackouts, the longest period yet, with more to come as the country’s electrical situation worsens.
According to Bloomberg estimates, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned corporation that provides virtually all of the energy in Africa’s most industrialised economy, has enforced daily blackouts since Oct. 31, making Monday the 99th consecutive day of disruptions.
Power rationing, also known as load-shedding in the local language, is required to preserve the nation’s system from collapse when Eskom’s aged, poorly maintained, largely coal-fired facilities fail to fulfil demand on 200 days in 2022.
Outages have plagued the country for almost 15 years and are expected to last at least another two while Eskom overhauls its electricity-generating fleet.
It is attempting to increase its energy availability factor — a measure of how much capacity can be used — from around half to 70% by March 2025, and requires an extra 4,000 to 6,000 megawatts of producing capacity to eliminate the blackouts.
The South African Reserve Bank has decreased its economic growth prediction for this year to 0.3% from 1.1% earlier, with Governor Lesetja Kganyago claiming that power outages will cut output growth by 2 percentage points in 2023. According to a Bloomberg poll, economists believe the United States will enter a recession this year.
On Sunday, EskomSePush, a popular load-shedding schedule tracker and notification app, announced that Eskom had established a new record of 984 straight hours of load-shedding.
This came after Eskom temporarily paused power interruptions for 11 hours during the day. Load-shedding was restarted at stage 2 at 16:00 for the evening peak.
Load-shedding has reached stage 3 by Monday morning, with stage 4 slated for the evening peak.
By Wednesday, Eskom intends to decrease load shedding to an alternating schedule of stage 2 and stage 3 power outages.
The state-owned power provider stated on Sunday that 15,215MW of its producing capacity had been broken down. This is around 33% of its total installed capacity of 47GW.
Another 5,199MW was taken down for planned maintenance.
