A Novel Way to End an Energy Crisis: Let the Market Work
After extended blackouts, South Africa’s government is giving people the freedom to break fossil-fuels’ hold over the grid.
Making the transition.
Photographer: Dwayne Senior/BloombergIf you want a model of a power system breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions, forget European gas networks and Texan power grids. Look at South Africa.
The decline and fall of government-owned utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. is a sign of everything that can go wrong in an electricity grid. Eskom generated nearly three-quarters of Africa’s electricity south of the Sahara in the late 1990s, but years of corruption, mismanagement and meddling have reduced it to a husk. Last year, South Africans faced blackouts on more than 200 days. This year has been even worse, with just a single day when there wasn’t a managed power cut somewhere in the country.