Energy Around the World: Access, Africa and Emerging Markets

In January 2023 South Africa's national utility, Eskom, was cutting up to 6,000 MW of demand at a time, "stage 6" in the schedule of rotating outages that South Africans call load-shedding, and cutting power on most days of the year (reported). Its chief executive, André de Ruyter, had resigned in December 2022 and left in February 2023 after saying in a television interview that organised crime was stealing coal and diesel and sabotaging its plants. On 9 February the government declared a national state of disaster. On 22 February the finance minister announced about R254 billion of debt relief for Eskom over three years, the largest state rescue of a company in the country's history (reported). In March the president appointed a minister of electricity. Eskom's coal fleet was available for only about 54.55% of its maximum possible output in the financial year to March 2023 (reported), against the high 80s in the early 2000s. 2023 was the worst year of power cuts in South Africa's history.

Eskom had been founded in 1923 to supply power at cost, with government backing for its borrowing. It owned most of South Africa's generation, mainly coal plus Africa's only nuclear plant at Koeberg, and the national grid. It had been barred from building new plant in 1998–2004, ran short of capacity and began load-shedding in 2007–08. It then approved two of the world's largest coal stations, Medupi in Limpopo (2007) and Kusile in Mpumalanga (2008), about 4.8 GW each. Their approved budgets reached R145 billion and R160.5 billion (Eskom, September 2026), against original budgets of about R69–80 billion and about R80 billion respectively: about 1.8–2 times the approved figures, before capitalised interest (reported). Medupi's last unit entered commercial service on 31 July 2021 and Kusile's on 29 September 2025, years late, and boiler design defects caused long outages. In between, the "state capture" years of 2015–18 turned Eskom's procurement into a channel for looting, as official inquiries later found, and its debt rose above R400 billion (reported).

Then the trend turned. Better maintenance, the last Medupi and Kusile units, the debt relief and a boom in private rooftop and commercial solar, after the government raised the licensing threshold for private generation to 100 MW in August 2021 and removed it in July 2022, ended national load-shedding: there has been none since 16 May 2025 (Eskom). Eskom reported a profit after tax of about R30.3 billion for the year to March 2026, with debt of about R356 billion (reported). Its new problems were the mirror of the old. Its sales volumes fell 6.2% in that year and its industrial sales 22.5% (reported), as customers who had built their own solar left; municipalities owed it about R112–119 billion; and the regulator, NERSA, approved tariff increases of 12.74% in April 2025, 8.76% in April 2026 and 8.83% for April 2027 that customers found hard to pay.