Eskom Records 231 Consecutive Load-Shedding-Free Days in 2025, Ending Year Without Interruptions
JOHANNESBURG, 2 January 2026. South Africa's state electricity utility Eskom ended 2025 having recorded 231 consecutive days without implementing load shedding, its longest uninterrupted supply run since 2018, after completing the calendar year with only 26 hours of rotational power cuts, all...
Eskom Records 231 Consecutive Load-Shedding-Free Days in 2025, Ending Year Without Interruptions
JOHANNESBURG, 2 January 2026. South Africa's state electricity utility Eskom ended 2025 having recorded 231 consecutive days without implementing load shedding, its longest uninterrupted supply run since 2018, after completing the calendar year with only 26 hours of rotational power cuts, all confined to April and May.
The milestone, confirmed by Eskom and reported by Bloomberg and other outlets on 2 January 2026, marked a substantial recovery from 2024, when Eskom implemented 6,367 hours of load shedding, and from the record 2023 period, during which South Africa's economy lost an estimated R481 billion in output due to power outages. The utility attributed the turnaround to its Generation Recovery Plan, which focused on disciplined maintenance execution and reducing unplanned outages.
By end-December 2025, Eskom's Energy Availability Factor, the measure of available generation capacity relative to installed capacity, had risen by more than 12 percentage points year on year, and unplanned outages had fallen by approximately 5,506 megawatts from the levels recorded in the same period in 2024. These gains reflected improvements across the coal-fired fleet, which provides approximately 80% of South Africa's electricity.
Eskom's recovery has been one of the most significant contributors to improved business and consumer confidence in South Africa in 2025. The utility recorded a profit before tax of R23.9 billion for its 2024/25 financial year, its first full-year profit in eight years, and announced plans to reinvest the surplus in infrastructure maintenance and capacity expansion over the next five years.
Challenges remain. Municipal arrears owed to Eskom stood at R94.6 billion as of March 2025, representing a 27% increase from the prior year, and the utility continued to warn that the financial viability of its distribution operations was threatened by non-payment from local governments. The establishment of the South African Wholesale Electricity Market, intended to facilitate private-sector competition in generation, remained in progress.
Eskom supplies the majority of electricity in South Africa and is fully owned by the national government. Its financial deterioration during the 2010s and early 2020s, driven by mismanagement, corruption, and deferred maintenance, caused some of the most prolonged load shedding episodes in the country's history.