Dark days for South Africans as aging utility imposes rolling blackouts

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA— It’s barely two hours into a baking hot Johannesburg working day and in a Haagen-Dazs store in an upmarket shopping district, the ice cream is melting.

“The power went off yesterday and it’s gone off again today,” Yvonne Moyo, a shift manager at the shop, says as she searches for a schedule of South Africa’s power cuts on her phone. “The moment the power goes off, the ice cream melts. I have to get a trolley and move all the ice cream downstairs.”

Moyo’s plight is typical of the struggle faced by many South Africans who have endured days of rolling blackouts this month. Roads resemble parking lots as motorists struggle through intersections with no functioning traffic lights, while Parliament has sought assurances that the power won’t go off during President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation speech in Cape Town on Feb. 12.

Eskom Holdings SOC, the stateowned utility that supplies about 95 per cent of South Africa’s electricity, has introduced blackouts, known locally as load shedding, because it doesn’t have enough power to meet demand in Africa’s most-industrialized economy. The company hasn’t opened a new coal-fired plant since 2001, even as it extended supply to an extra seven million people after the first democratic elections in 1994.

The outages, the worst since 2008, are partly due to maintenance, needed to prevent bigger blackouts in the future, and partly due to frequent breakdowns of the aging plants. There’s a high risk that the utility will implement a seventh day of electricity blackouts as the system is “extremely constrained,” Eskom said on its Twitter account on Monday.

Three months of power cuts could shave one percentage point off South Africa’s economic growth rate, says Matthew Sharratt, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.