South Africa’s Power-Cut Record Shattered in Just Nine Months
- Nation cut 5,761 GWh through September versus 2,521 in 2021
- Council for Scientific and Industrial Research tallied outages
Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg
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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 Holdings SOC Ltd. implemented power cuts -- locally known as loadshedding -- 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.