From dairy farms failing to refrigerate their milk to chickens suffocating due to ventilator failures and entrepreneurs struggling to stay afloat, South Africa is experiencing its worst energy crisis in years.
Africa’s most industrialized country has been hit by crippling blackouts, forcing thousands of consumers to take to the streets in protest this week.
Here’s what you need to know about the crisis:
– Eskom’s eight levels of distress –
State-owned utility Eskom implements blackouts, known as load-shedding, when supply fails to meet demand.
There are eight levels of these scheduled cuts, with outages ranging from two and a half hours to more than 12 hours total per day.
This month, the blackout has oscillated between stages three and six.
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The last two stages have never been run but there have been record six-day stages in recent months.
During that time, the power goes out for half a day, and only those with generators, solar panels or wind turbines can get relief.
The anger has led to several protests in recent days and lawsuits against the authorities.
Outages cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost output every day, according to opposition estimates.
– How did South Africa get here? –
The crisis that hit Eskom has several causes.
The end of apartheid in 1994 was followed by a push to connect previously black-majority areas without electricity.
This, coupled with economic growth and surging population, which has swelled from less than 45 million to 60 million, has fed demand.
In 2007, the year the first blackout was implemented, Eskom began building two new coal-fired power stations to try to compensate.
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But older plants are subject to damage and require maintenance.
And the new plant itself has suffered from commissioning delays, design and construction problems, massive cost overruns and allegations of corruption.
Eskom also blamed the problem on sabotage, the theft of coal and spare parts by organized gangs – leading to the deployment of the military to guard the power plants.
The ailing monopoly has amassed a debt of 400 billion rand ($23 billion), equivalent to nearly a quarter of South Africa’s annual GDP.
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In the past year, he said he ran out of money to buy diesel, which burns to make production shortfalls caused by breakdowns.
South Africa uses coal, of which there is a lot, to generate about 80 percent of its electricity.
It is estimated that it will take 1.5 trillion rand to switch from fossil fuels. Last year it secured hundreds of millions of dollars in international funding to help transition to cleaner sources.
– Is there a solution? –
The government, which the opposition blamed for the crisis, made the plan last July.
These include improving maintenance, importing electricity from neighboring countries and speeding up the rollout of renewable energy, a process that has long been discussed with protections for the coal industry, which employs nearly 100,000 people.
A licensing threshold for private power generation projects has been removed and the pricing structure for private companies to sell electricity generated by rooftop solar panels will be ended, President Cyril Ramaphosa said this week.
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The president has warned the crisis cannot be resolved overnight, although some cabinet ministers have boasted that it could be resolved within six to 18 months.
Bertha Dlamini, head of the non-profit African Women in Energy and Power, warned that renewables are gathering power but “not fast enough to protect the country” from blackouts.
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“Load-shedding will be with us for a few years, it can increase but it is less likely to disappear completely for the next three years,” she said.