The latest interactive analysis from residential‑solar specialist Wetility reveals a striking patchwork of electricity reliability across South Africa’s municipalities. While Eskom has celebrated the end of load‑shedding, the data shows that many communities still endure outages lasting anywhere from a couple of hours to nearly a full day.
Wetility compiled telemetry from its nationwide network of solar panels and battery storage units, turning raw numbers into a publicly accessible outage lookup tool. Users can type in their municipality and instantly see metrics such as average outage length, monthly trends, and how their area stacks up against others. The tool aims to give households, businesses, and local officials a clearer picture of the real‑world performance of the grid.
“Grid reliability is not a solely national conversation,” explained Wetility’s Chief Commercial Officer Franta Pour. “Municipalities grapple with aging infrastructure, rampant cable theft, and tight revenue streams. Those pressures surface in the variability we’re seeing.” The interactive map, therefore, serves as a diagnostic aid for decision‑makers seeking to address local weaknesses rather than relying on blanket national policies.
Despite its usefulness, the dataset covers only 57 of South Africa’s 257 municipalities—just over a fifth of the total. Moreover, Wetility did not disclose how many solar‑equipped households contributed data in each area, nor did it define what constitutes an “outage.” The lack of clarification leaves room for interpretation differences between a single household interruption and a widespread transformer failure.
South Africa power outages
The numbers paint a sobering picture. In 2025 the average grid interruption across the surveyed districts stretched to 12.1 hours. Yet the spread is enormous: iLembe district in KwaZulu‑Natal recorded a modest two‑hour average, while Amajuba district, also in KZN, logged a staggering 18.6 hours—with 82.7 % of those events exceeding eight hours. Waterberg district in Limpopo, home to the 4.8 GW Medupi power station, showed an average of 16.4 hours, and nearly 80 % of its outages surpassed the eight‑hour mark.
Even metropolitan areas are not immune. The City of Tshwane reported an average outage duration of 15.6 hours, and 69.5 % of those incidents lasted beyond eight hours. Such figures suggest that the end of load‑shedding has not translated into consistent supply for many urban residents.
The skew in Wetility’s sample may further cloud the picture. Solar installations remain costly, concentrating primarily in higher‑income neighbourhoods. Consequently, the data likely underrepresents lower‑income districts where grid challenges could be even more acute.
Telecommunications operators are already feeling the strain. Earlier this month TechCentral highlighted that, despite the cessation of load‑shedding, mobile providers are diverting capital meant for network expansion toward power‑resilience measures. ACT’s CEO Nomvuyiso Batyi warned that “whenever power cuts occur, vandalism spikes, forcing telecoms to burn more diesel and increase operational costs.”
The broader narrative emerging from Wetility’s findings is one of uneven recovery. While Eskom boasts over 300 consecutive days without load‑shedding and improved generation availability, local realities vary dramatically. For many South Africans, the promise of a stable grid remains unfulfilled, underscoring the need for targeted municipal interventions and broader investment in grid modernization.