Browsing: Independent power producers in South Africa

Thandiwe Sithole studies by a candle while her grandmother Phumzile Sithole looks on during one of frequent power outages from South African utility Eskom caused by its aging coal-fired plants, in Soweto, South Africa. www.theexchange.africa

Power crisis: Southern Africa’s affair with electricity

Industry and Trade

According to the World Bank Group, Sub-Saharan Africa is in the midst of a power crisis marked by insufficient generating capacity, unreliable supplies, high prices, and low rates of popular access to the electricity grid. The region’s capacity for generating power is lower than that of any other world region, and growth in that capacity has stagnated.

A friend of mine said if the current power situation continues in the direction, it is going, soon enough, he will take his family on a trip just to see ‘electricity’. This is a joke not too far from the truth. Southern Africa stands at the precipice of a major electricity crisis.

The energy crisis, most notably manifesting in the form of successive rounds of load-shedding, is an ongoing period of widespread national-level rolling blackouts as electricity supply falls behind electricity demand, threatening to destabilize the national power grid.

South Africa’s state power …