South Africa is experiencing an energy crisis.
Take a look at this chart.
This year, the country has had one day with consistent electricity.
But for more than 185 days, South Africa
has experienced load-shedding, over 3,000 hours without power.
And it's expected to double by the end of the year.
So the extent of load-shedding is growing, worsening
and it is becoming a permanent fixture in South African life.
The problem has become so dire that President Cyril Ramaphosa declared ...
"a national state of disaster to respond
to the electricity crisis and its impact."
So why is South Africa in the dark?
So what exactly is load-shedding?
It's a term often used in South Africa for planned rolling electricity blackouts.
And it's become a problem in other countries with
developing economies, like India, Pakistan and Lebanon.
In South Africa, they're carried out by Eskom, a state utility company that
supplies more than 90% of the country's electricity.
Load-shedding should be understood as a preventative measure,
to prevent a electrical grid from collapse and from severe damage.
That's energy policy researcher Brian Kamanzi.
His working paper "The Crisis in South Africa's Energy Sector" explores
the Eskom crisis and the country's transition to renewable energy.
You see, the bulk of South Africa's power is generated by old, dilapidated
coal-fired power plants that were built in the ’60s and ’70s.
Because the system cannot meet the demand for electricity,
Eskom shorts the supply by load-shedding,
which occurs in stages ranging from 1 to 8.
During Stage 1, residents might go without power three times
over an eight-day period for four hours at a time.
Stage 8 is worse:
Load-shedding would occur six times a day or for 12 hours,
depending on the schedule.
On June 11, Eskom issued this power alert:
“Stage 4 load-shedding will be implemented from 16:00
until midnight.”
Can you imagine being without power regularly for eight hours?
Well, South Africans have been dealing with blackouts like this since 2007.
These blackouts rattle every aspect of daily life, affecting hospitals,
education, and the food and water supplies.
You might remember this viral video
of workers removing 50,000 dead chickens from a farm.
The birds reportedly suffocated when power outages
caused the ventilation system to stop.
Then there's South Africa's economy.
Load-shedding is both creating and adding to the nation's high unemployment rate
and its faltering economy, costing South Africa almost 900 million rand,
or $48 million, a day.
Because load-shedding is a rotational rationing,
everyone in South Africa is impacted by load-shedding.
Of course, different people and organizations are able
to insulate themselves from the impacts of load-shedding
because they have the resources.
Resources like solar energy, battery systems and diesel generators.
And those who don't have access are hit the hardest.
It's drifting people more into energy poverty.
People are switching to fuels like paraffin and candle-burning for lighting.
Some Black communities are 3.5 times more likely to have power cuts
than majority-white areas.
Eskom has even been accused of using longer outages in Black neighborhoods.
- The particular hours that were being load-shed for Black, working-class users,
especially in townships, was very punitive,
was at the precise times that they may be returning from home.
And it was observed to be racially biased.
But energy racism is not new to South Africa.
Part of the crisis that we are seeing is the lack of the ability of
the ANC government to establish a new, progressive economic paradigm
in the post-apartheid era that can both industrialize
but also can extend its benefits
to the broader population, to the Black working class in particular.
So let's take a step back.
Apartheid was a legal system
for racial segregation against nonwhite residents of South Africa.
It began in 1948, after the National Party were voted
into power by the white minority.
The party governed South Africa for decades.
- We have every right to maintain our
identity as whites.
From 1948 to 1971, the National Party instituted 148 apartheid laws,
dividing people by race: white, "colored,"
Native or Black, and Asian or Indian.
Race controlled every aspect of life in South Africa,
from jobs, public facilities and transportation
to education and health systems.
Black people even had to carry passbooks, which restricted where they could
travel and stipulated where they worked.
Under apartheid, 3.5 million nonwhite South Africans
were also removed from cities and their homes and relocated
to segregated urban townships or mostly rural Bantustans.
During this period, Eskom was the electricity
utility of the settler-colonial apartheid state.
It principally provided electricity to the country's ruling white minority
and subsidized service for the country's manufacturing and mining sectors.
Electricity hadn't been as integrated as it is now into what
people consider to be the basic elements of living a decent life.
So there's very low levels of rural electrification.
The inequality of infrastructure
was mapped onto the inequalities enshrined in the apartheid project.
By 1994, apartheid had ended, but
only about half of South Africans had electricity.
Nearly all white households had access, but many Black families had none.
It was at the turnover of the new government,
an impulse to redistribute access to basic services.
We had a massive rural electrification scheme that was largely financed
through public funds.
We had the concept of free basic services, a free basic electricity.
South Africa's new ANC government came to power promising
to serve the country's poor.
But its leaders soon embraced pro-business, neoliberal policies
that worsened inequality.
Under the ANC, Eskom had been plagued by decades
of corruption and mismanagement.
Inadequate planning was done to ensure that there is sufficient generation
capacity procured.
So we failed to plan, but also we
failed to maintain what we have. Leads to poor performance.
In 2007, South Africa started construction on two of the world's
largest coal-fired plants, Medupi and Kusile.
They were touted as the answer to load- shedding and the country's energy crisis.
But due to design flaws and equipment failures, 16 years later ...
Both the plants are operating well below 50% of their capacity.
It's a devastating situation.
Other estimates put one plant at 70% operational
and the other at just over 37%.
Currently, the South African government is focused on improving the performance
of its existing coal fleet and procuring renewable energy from other producers.
Regarding long-term solutions,
there are calls for the country to cut its carbon emissions
by transitioning to renewable energies like wind and solar.
Ending reliance on fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy is generally considered
to be one of the most effective ways of fighting the climate crisis.
But it does come with challenges. First, South Africa's coal mines employ
90,000 people. And renewable energy is still often expensive,
so many people can't afford to install systems that support it.
Plus, South Africa's electricity infrastructure doesn't really support renewable energy.
We are having issues implementing our capacity requirements,
and a lot of that has to do with transmission.
So the transmission network, which is essentially
the highways of the electricity system that is built throughout the country,
it was never designed to accommodate a massive build-out of renewable energy.
But Kamanzi also warns that the transition to renewable energy
in South Africa has become associated with privatization.
Not all that glitters is gold.
They are glittery plans that are being made
in international forums to say South Africa is going green
and that there will be all these jobs created.
But that's not necessarily true.
Shortly after South Africa announced plans to go green at the COP27 Summit,
the coal-fired Komati power station was shut down.
Which, without the requisite planning, that have left many people in the
in the plant and people indirectly employed in the area, you know,
without livelihood.
Other countries dealing with load-shedding
are also trying to figure out how to solve this growing problem.
How South Africa moves to make an equitable transition
to renewable energy could offer solutions for others as well.
- We have to look at what's actually happening on the ground.
Who is in the room?
You know, unions and civil society organizations have not been part
of the negotiating teams
that are engaging with the World Bank, engaging with governments
from the UK, France and the U.S. while offering climate finance.
Are we putting questions like affordability at a center?
Are we putting universal access at the center?
What are the principles that are driving our transition?
Who gets to make those choices?
I think that what happens in South Africa, and the lesson that we have to share with
the South is the importance of consultation. The importance of not
leaving everybody behind, but also the risk that comes
with privatizing the transition.