Power crisis deepens despite end of load shedding

Just recently, Eskom was crowing about doing its job – by managing to go 300 straight days since the last load shedding. But that hid a bitter reality – ordinary South Africans’ electricity woes seem to be getting worse, not better. New data from solar groupWetility’scountrywide network of installations showed that its clients experienced just over 91 000 outages in 2025.

No surprise that the worst offender was City Power in Johannesburg – Wetility’s clients there went through 10 864 outages in 2025. These averaged just under 14 hours in duration. Joburg also had the worst ratio of long power outages in the country, with more than 65% of them lasting eight hours or more.

This is a far cry from the national standard – as set out in a recent City of Tshwane document – which requires that electricity supply be restored in 30% of all unplanned outages within 1.5 hours, 60% within 3.5 hours, 90% within 7.5 hours and 98% within 24 hours. In February last year – which Wetility says was the month of worst performance for the national grid – Tshwane was able to restore only 57.5% of outages within 24 hours, according to the council report. Of course, there is a caveat to the statistics which could be used in their defence by failing municipalities: Wetility is, effectively, a competitor because it is involved in alternative energy.

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Therefore, there might be an incentive in making the “normal” electricity suppliers look bad as a way of drumming up new solar business. Wetility has data to back up its assertions and, while its figures naturally don’t apply to the whole country, they seem to be representative of what most of us – and particularly those unlucky enough to live in the Gauteng metros – experience every month.

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