South Africa Suffers Widespread Blackouts

Blackouts started rolling across parts of South Africa on Thursday after a week's worth of rain soaked the coal supply of the country's state-run power company, making it too wet to burn.

The problem is familiar to South Africans, and it has the potential to be much more than a simple annoyance. Eskom, which supplies 95% of the nation's electricity, declared its third energy emergency in the last two weeks on Thursday, but this is the first time in six years the country will see rolling blackouts. Continue...


A five-day power shortage in 2008 shut down hospital equipment, forced drivers to drive without traffic lights, shut down South Africa's massive gold and platinum mines, costing the economy billions of dollars and ultimately leading to a downgrade in the nation's credit rating. The government knew about the potential for shortages years before 2008, according to The Guardian, but it still hasn't found a way to prevent them from happening.

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Eskom has been trying to catch up to South Africa's electricity demands for years. The company is spending $46.7 billion to upgrade equipment and build three new power stations, according to Bloomberg. Agence France Presse reports that those stations are meant to boost South Africa's electricity transmission and generation capacity from an average of around 40,000 megawatts to about 57,000. South Africa consumes 212 million megawatt hours per year, according to Index Mundi.

That nation's government has also been looking to move away from their coal dependency by exploring alternatives such as nuclear energy and shale gas.

Medupi, one of the larger coal plants, was scheduled to be up and running by the end of 2013, but labor problems and contractor issues have caused delays that have pushed completion into the latter half of this year.

Without the additional capacity, South Africa's power grid is occasionally overmatched. To prevent the overload from causing wide-ranging blackouts on Thursday, Eskom cut the electricity to a few regions over a period of a few hours, a process known as "load shedding" that lowers demand on the supply as a whole. They posted a schedule of the blackouts so citizens would know when and for how long their power would be out.

"The power system is very tight," Eskom said in a statement released on the company's website. "This risk has increased significantly due to the heavy rains over the last few day and an increase in technical problems experienced at some of Eskom's power stations."

The company didn't respond to a request for comment.

Eskom has asked industrial customers to reduce their electricity use by 10% throughout the day and they've implored people to stop using any unnecessary appliances, such as pool pumps.

So far, this series of blackouts doesn't look to be as grave as the situation was in 2008. Eskom began cutting power at 9 a.m. local time and hopes to wrap up by 10 p.m.