Amid all the focus on Europe's energy troubles in the past year, a byproduct of the continent's legacy reliance on Russian commodity exports, it has largely slipped the world's attention that a far more brutal - and mostly ignored - energy crisis is taking place right now in South Africa, which recently declared a state of disaster due to its energy crisis.
This crisis, discussed in more detailed below, came to a head overnight when South African utility Eskom - which is not only the largest producer of electricity in South Africa but in all of Africa, and is among the top utilities in the world in terms of generation capacity and sales - and which has been forced to implement power cuts every day this year as its fleet of old and defective coal-powered stations frequently breaks down, reached an unprecedented level of power cuts, indicated late on Tuesday by the company spokesman.
The company cut 7.045GW from the grid through load shedding so as to keep the grid from a total collapse, Sikonathi Mantshantsha said in a post on Twitter.
Poster Comment:
Blame affirmative action. They fired White technicians from power plants and replaced them with untrained Africans.