- President Cyril Ramaphosa announced government interventions to stabilise the electricity supply in July, but South Africans will need patience.
- Ramaphosa cut short an overseas trip to hold a Cabinet meeting on the crisis on Wednesday.
- South Africans have been dealing with load shedding since 2007, and there is no end in sight.
The South African energy crisis escalated this week as Eskom implemented Stage 6 load shedding in the early hours of Sunday morning. The state-owned power utility is struggling to meet electricity demand, and rolling blackouts were, once again, the order of the day.
This week on The Story, we speak to News24 investigative journalist Kyle Cowan and News24 writer-at-large Carol Paton about the crisis many fear will only get worse.
The last time South Africa had Stage 6 load shedding was in July, and Cowan said this week's blackouts were a surprise. He said the reason for ramping up load shedding was because of multiple breakdowns.
ROLLING COVERAGE | Eskom and load shedding news as it happens
"Between 3 September and 18 September, Eskom experienced 99 breakdowns or unit trips across its power stations around the country,” Cowan said.
"We should be alarmed every time there is load shedding because, effectively, it means our system is so broken that Eskom is having to take these drastic steps to prevent a complete blackout," he added.
Cowan said there is no evidence that this latest round of load shedding resulted from sabotage, but he believes "the greatest acts of sabotage against Eskom has been the ANC's bad policy decisions".
Paton said when it comes to fixing the energy availability factor, "we are in for a very long haul". A year ago, Eskom said it would have 72% of its plants running most of the time, "they have now said we're anticipating that that will be 59%". She said fixing Eskom is a long way off, "and there are increasing doubts about the extent to which it can be fixed, or whether it's just a case of managing its decline".
Paton said load shedding is causing catastrophic damage to the economy.
"For every day of every stage of load shedding, it costs the economy R500 million. That is what is lost to the GDP… so we're losing billions every day as we go through this very intense period of load shedding," she said.