Rolling Blackout - South Africa

South Africa

There is a long history of rolling blackouts in South Africa, with multiple causes. In South Africa the major producer and distributor of electricity is Eskom, which provides over 95% of the country's energy usage. During the 1980s Eskom mothballed three of their coal-fired power stations, as there was an excess of generation capacity at the time. With the demise of Apartheid in the 1990s came massive investment and economic growth. At the same time the government tried to deregulate the electricity supply industry by inviting the private sector to build new power stations to meet the rapidly growing demand for electricity. Eskom was at the time prevented from building new power stations (including de-mothballing the three existing power stations) or from strengthening the transmission network. The transmission network is especially important in delivering power from Mpumalanga, where the majority of the power stations are located, to other parts of the country such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. With no bidders coming forward to construct new power stations, there was effectively no investment into new generation plants during the early 1990s, which eventually led to the shortage of capacity that was experienced in the 2000s.

In 1998, the Department of Minerals and Energy released a detailed energy review in which it explicitly warned that unless "timely steps were taken to ensure that demand does not exceed available supply capacity", generating capacity would reach its limit by 2007.