Load shedding record shattered in just nine months

South Africa experienced an unprecedented number of scheduled blackouts in 2021, but that record has been broken twice over in the first nine months of this year.

Depending mainly on unreliable coal-burning power stations, state-owned utility Eskom implemented power cuts — locally known as load shedding — of 5 761 gigawatt hours through September versus 2 521 gigawatt hours last year, which was a record at the time, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research said in a report.

The so-called energy availability factor of Eskom’s fleet has been declining every year since 2017, the CSIR showed. The power cuts that have curbed South Africa’s economic growth continued on Monday.