The Unequal Distribution of Blackouts During South Africa’s Energy Crisis

• In Event: Climate Change and Population Health

Abstract

What happens when electricity is unreliable and unequal? The benefits of electrification in the Global South are widely documented, but we know less about the distribution of reliable energy and its downstream effects. Throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s, South Africa experienced chronic energy shortages requiring the government to limit energy usage through targeted blackouts known as ‘loadshedding’. Loadshedding reached crisis levels in 2022, reflected by more than 6,000 hours of power cuts between August 2022 and July 2023. The crisis peaks in February 2023, when nearly 30% of all person-hours were spent without electricity. In this article, I introduce a novel data set measuring the distribution of loadshedding across 30,0000 suburbs in South Africa from 2022 - 2023 and ask 1) Which populations were most affected by power cuts?, and 2) To what extent were disadvantaged populations disproportionately in the dark?. This paper makes two key contributions. First, I provide a detailed and nuanced measure of outage distribution and energy reliability at the suburb level. Second, I find that while the entire country experienced substantial outages, cuts were unequally distributed across communities. Municipalities with lower levels of electrification at baseline and those with higher rates of multidimensional poverty experienced worse loadshedding. The wide-reaching effects of protracted power outages may therefore disproportionately harm disadvantaged communities. These findings have important implications for measuring the distribution of electricity and understanding the causes and consequences of unreliable electricity throughout the Global South.

Author

• Patrick Shaw, Brown University