The power shortage has plagued South Africa for more than a year as Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned utility that supplies more than 90% of the nation's electricity, can't produce enough power from its old and poorly maintained plants to meet demand.
On December 7, Eskom warned the outages by raising the scheduled power cuts to "Stage 6", the worst level on record, suggesting up to 6 GW of units were disconnected from the national grid and putting households and businesses in strain without power for at least six hours a day.
"This is due to a high number of breakdowns since midnight, as well as the requirement to strictly preserve the remaining emergency generation reserves," Eskom said in a statement.
The "Stage 6" power cuts would last until December 9, after which the situation would be eased to Stage 5 until December 10.
Power outages are not unusual in South Africa. So far this year, outages have happened over more than 100 days in the nation, leaving a severe consequence to the nation's economic growth.
World Bank economists estimated that rationing would cost the economy $24 billion in 2022. South Africa's central bank predicted GDP growth would slow to 1.1% in 2023 from 1.8% in 2022, with 0.6 percentage point of that slide due to power rationing.
Coal, the cheapest and most available energy sources in South Africa, produces about 80% of power for the nation. However, instead of working to use coal in a more efficient way to avoid rolling blackouts, the nation is starting to shift from coal to renewables funded by western countries.
At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, the U.S., the U.K., the EU, Germany and France offered South Africa $8.5 billion in funding to assist in its transition from coal to renewable energy such as wind and solar.
Eskom has 14 coal-fired power stations. Most of them are old, inefficient and prone to breakdowns. It started construction of two new plants in 2007, but cost overruns and design flaws made them still not available today.
In 2020, just 7% of the country's energy came from renewable sources, according to the International Energy Agency.
(Writing by Alex Guo Editing by Tammy Yang)
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