Johannesburg:
From dairy farms not keeping milk refrigerated to chickens suffocating en masse from failing ventilators and undertakers struggling to preserve bodies, South Africa is succumbing to its worst power crisis in years.
Africa’s most industrialized country has been hit by crippling blackouts, prompting thousands of consumers to take to the streets this week to protest.
Here’s what you need to know about the crisis:
Eight levels of misery
The state-owned Eskom imposes blackouts, called load shedding, when supply does not meet demand.
There are eight levels of these scheduled outages, with outages ranging from two and a half hours to just over 12 hours in total per day.
This month, blackouts fluctuated between stages three and six.
The last two stages have never been performed, but there have been a record number of stage six days in recent months.
At such times, the power goes out for half a day and only people with generators, solar panels or a wind turbine can get lighting.
Rising anger has led to several protests and lawsuits against the authorities in recent days.
Opposition estimates say power outages cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost production each day.
How did South Africa get here?
The crisis in Eskom has several causes.
The end of apartheid in 1994 was followed by an attempt to connect areas where the black majority previously had no electricity.
This, coupled with economic growth and a growing population, which has grown from less than 45 million to 60 million, has fueled demand.
In 2007, the year when power cuts were first introduced, Eskom began construction of two new coal-fired power plants to keep pace.
But older installations are plagued by breakdowns and need constant maintenance.
And the new plants themselves have suffered from commissioning delays, design and construction issues, massive cost overruns and transplant allegations.
Eskom also blames its problems on sabotage, theft of coal and spare parts by organized gangs, which led to the deployment of the army to guard the power plants.
The ailing monopoly has incurred a debt of R400 billion ($23 billion), equivalent to nearly a quarter of South Africa’s annual GDP.
Last year it said it ran out of money to buy diesel, which it burns to make up for production shortfalls due to breakdowns.
South Africa uses coal, which it has in abundance, to generate about 80 percent of its electricity.
It estimates it needs R1.5 trillion to move away from fossil fuels. Last year it secured hundreds of millions of dollars in international funding to help the transition to cleaner sources.
Is there a solution?
The government, which blames the opposition for the crisis, came up with a plan last July.
This includes improving maintenance, importing electricity from neighboring countries and accelerating the rollout of renewables, a process long held back by protections for the coal industry, which employs nearly 100,000 people.
A permit threshold for private power generation projects has been removed and a pricing structure to allow private companies to sell electricity generated by rooftop solar panels will be finalized soon, President Cyril Ramaphosa said this week.
The president has warned that the crisis cannot be solved overnight, although some of his cabinet ministers boasted it could be over in six to 18 months.
Bertha Dlamini, the head of nonprofit African Women in Energy and Power, warned that renewables are gaining momentum, but “not fast enough to protect the country from blackouts.”
“Load shedding will be with us for a number of years. It may improve, but it’s less likely to disappear completely over the next three years,” she said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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