Load-shedding: Eskom and the electricity crisis

Generation and demand come from Ember, a research centre that compiles national and international electricity statistics (CC BY 4.0 licence). Generation covers the plants of Eskom, the state utility, and independent producers; rooftop solar not passing through the grid is estimated and may be under-counted. Demand is generation plus net imports; divided by the population (World Bank), it gives consumption per person in kilowatt-hours.

Load-shedding itself is not measured here. Eskom publishes the hours of « manual load reduction » on its data portal, but its terms of use reserve the data to Eskom and forbid exploiting it in any way: Citoyen does not reuse them. The value added of electricity, gas and water, in constant 2015 rand, comes from the national accounts published by the South African Reserve Bank; it measures the sector’s activity, not the power delivered.