Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., which produces most of South Africa's power, said on Wednesday that controlled blackouts could return and last throughout the year. Even more concerning is that the company expects energy availability of the system will keep declining into early next year and probably only recover to current levels in six months.
By Thursday, Eskom announced it was cutting 1,000 megawatts from the grid. It doubled that amount on Friday in an outage that's scheduled to last 13 hours.
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For South Africans, that means a return to stocking up on candles, mopping up thawed refrigerators and sitting in gridlocked roads around blank traffic lights. All of that became familiar in 2008, and again in 2015, when Eskom implemented months of the outages known locally as load shedding. Those cuts hamstrung the economy, limiting industrial output and hurting business and consumer confidence.
That's just the opposite of what President Cyril Ramaphosa set out to achieve when he took office earlier this year, seeking investment and targeting economic growth. A new board and leadership at Eskom was intended to turn the business around. While the utility took steps to root out corruption and encourage whistleblowers, it has twice delayed the announcement of a much-anticipated recovery plan.
