In South Africa, rolling blackouts – or “load shedding” – have gone from being a very rare occurrence to a common feature of everyday life, shoddy maintenance of the country’s power generation and transmission network has forced national utility Eskom to institute power cuts of up to two hours twice a day.
At the current trend, it’s a 1360% rise in the number of hours in darkness due to blackouts in South Africa, from an average of just 50 hours per year prior to 2014, to 730 hours per year in 2014 – 2015.
Gas or electricity?
Electricity tariffs have been low in South Africa because the bulk of power is generated from coal, which is cheap. Because of this, far more South Africans use electric stoves to cook than in the rest of Africa, where doing so would send power bills skyrocketing beyond belief.
So because the average person is so much more dependent on electricity, load shedding is likely to be felt much harder.
In most of the rest of Africa, biomass fuels like charcoal and firewood are more popular – even in the cities, except in the urban areas there is a greater tendency to use charcoal as it has higher energy content and is easier to transport than fuelwood.
Eskom’s power plants evolution
The South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) recently released a report which stated that one of the reasons South Africa is facing an electricity crisis is because the government prohibited Eskom from building power stations in 1998.
Eskom was told to stop building additional stations soon after there was talk about it being unbundled or privatised, but the new directives from the government were vague and confusing.
Meanwhile, South Africa was running out of electricity and the government took no action to get Eskom back on track as demand increased. By 2008, demand was outstripping supply, and Eskom had to implement load shedding to prevent a national blackout.
