South Africa’s energy crisis deepens as blackouts hit 12 hours a day

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa was forced this week to cancel a trip to

by an escalating energy crisis that is inflicting rolling blackouts on the continent’s most developed economy.

Ramaphosa swapped his trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland for emergency meetings on the “ongoing energy crisis,” his spokesperson Vincent Magwenya posted on Twitter on Monday.

South Africans have endured power cuts for years but 2022 was the worst on record with 205 days of rolling blackouts, as aging coal-fired power plants broke down and state-owned power utility Eskom struggled to find the money to buy diesel for emergency generators.

So far this year, there have been outages every day. The situation worsened again last week when Eskom said it would implement more cuts because of breakdowns at 11 coal-fired generating units…

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