Expect dark days ahead in South Africa

While Eskom and the Minister of Electricity are confident that they’ll avoid power cuts this winter, energy experts have warned that bouts of load shedding are more than likely to occur during the colder months. 

Delivering its winter outlook for 2025, Eskom said its base case sees no load shedding in winter, outside of a couple of days already experienced in April.

The utility said that as long as unplanned outages do not exceed 13,000MW, the lights should stay on.

In a worst-case scenario, where outages exceed 15,000MW, load shedding should be limited to 21 days not going higher than stage 2.

Working in Eskom’s favour, Medupi Unit 4 is expected to return in the coming months, adding 800MW of energy to the grid for the winter period.

With Kusile Unit 6 also in the mix and Koeberg Unit 1 expected by July, this should help Eskom avoid load shedding. It said there should be about 2,500 MW more available than a year ago.

Speaking at the Cape Town G20 Energy Transitions Working Group meeting at the end of April, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa was optimistic about the country’s prospects.

Despite “setbacks” in 2025, which saw five separate load shedding events since February, the minister said “there’s no reason for performance to regress.”

However, energy experts have warned that South Africans should still expect some load shedding this winter as the grid remains unpredictable.

One such expert is former Eskom and City Power executive manager, Professor Vally Padayachee.

Padayachee said he believes Eskom’s assurances about increased generation capacity, but stressed that the power fleet is still fragile and open to shocks.

He added that the utility is still relying on emergency diesel turbines, which is indicative that there is still some way to go. 

“But I’m of the opinion — and I’ve said this several times in the last couple of weeks — that Eskom would load shed because it is still not out of the woods in terms of risk.”

“From my knowledge of the system and the grid over the years, I believe they will likely load shed in winter. Hopefully, in my opinion, they keep it to under stage 3.” 

While he hopes outages will remain limited, Padayachee cautioned that the system’s reliability is still compromised. 

“The Energy Availability Factor (EAF) is still very low at about 57%, and there was no clarity on whether there’s enough reserve margin or headroom.”

He stressed that load shedding remains a strong possibility due to the vulnerability of the ageing coal fleet.

Load shedding is here to stay for years

Energy analyst Professor Hartmut Winkler from the University of Johannesburg also had doubts despite Eskom’s improvements. 

While he agrees that load shedding will likely return this winter, he added that the country will likely face load shedding for several more years.

“I’m afraid this is the sort of thing we’re going to be facing still for another couple of years,” he said. 

Like other experts, Winkler said South Africa looks much better than it was about a year ago or a year and a half ago, when we had what felt like endless load shedding.

However, he added that the country is still in a position where only about 60% of Eskom’s power-generating capacity is up and running, meaning the power utility remains in crisis mode.

“If several things go wrong at once, we could overstep that mark where Eskom simply cannot hold back, and then they’re forced to go into load shedding,” said Winkler. 

This was the case recently, when Eskom reintroduced stage 2 load shedding in April amid a cold front, planned maintenance, and suspected breakdowns. 

Winkler added that while Eskom has focused on improving performance at coal power stations, only so much can be done with ageing infrastructure. 

“What Eskom has been doing is trying to get the coal power stations to work better, but I’m not sure they can do much better on that front, given that these power stations are now quite old.”

The long-term solution, Winkler said, lies in building new, modern power facilities. “Ultimately, we need more modern, new power facilities to be built.”

“This includes solar plants — that’s the international trend — but other options exist. It’s just that those might take a lot longer to build.”

He said solar is the most viable option in the short to medium term, although progress has been slow due to Eskom’s grid contraints.