If, in France, we expect the heat wave in the next few days, in South Africa, it is the austral winter. If it is certainly temperate, it is nevertheless necessary to turn on the heating and to light up. However, power cuts are multiplying everywhere in the country, several times a day and, each time, lasting several hours. For South Africans, it is reminiscent of the days of Apartheid, when the black population had no access to basic services.
The national public company, Eskom, even warned that South Africans must prepare for at least 100 days of power outages in the coming months. And yet the problem is not new and only gets worse every year. You should know that South Africa is 80% dependent on coal to produce its electricity. Most of the plants are aging and have not been modernized due to a lack of planning, but also because of endemic corruption in the country which was particularly rampant under the presidency of Jacob Zuma between 2009 and 2018.
Accused of mismanagement, the national company is over-indebted and today finds itself unable to produce the electricity the country needs. In an emergency, it started up gas turbines which burn astronomical quantities of fuel, and whose bill further widens the deficit. To aggravate the situation, the electricity sector has recently experienced major strikes by workers demanding wage increases and housing subsidies. Many of them have deserted their jobs in the power stations.
But beyond this economic situation, South Africa is above all very late in its energy transition. It also received $7.7 billion in aid during the last COP26 in Glasgow. 10 megawatts of wind and solar energy should have been available today to start replacing coal, according to a government plan decided in 2015. Seven years later, these new energy sources are not there and there will take several years to build these eco-responsible infrastructures. The authorities will have to move quickly: the demand for electricity could triple by 2040. Suffice to say that the energy crisis in South Africa is not over.