South Africa power outages: some improvement but a long way to go before the grid is stable

Hartmut Winkler

Over the past few months, South Africa’s power generation sector has performed better than expected. Four factors explain this: an acceleration of solar power installations, less frequent breakdowns at power stations, a less restricted supply of diesel and the return to operation of some units at Kusile coal fired power station.

Throughout most of this year South Africa experienced prolonged and damaging electricity shortages, making 2023 the worst year to date. The power utility Eskom confirmed this in its annual results presentation, in which it said: “Eskom’s generating plant availability reached the lowest levels ever, due to unprecedented levels of unplanned unavailability.”

The percentage of functional power generating capacity, which was typically around 90% in the 1990s, has dropped over the past few years. It was between 50% and 60% for most of 2023.

Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, the country’s minister of electricity (a post created recently to deal with