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Load shedding: How SA compares with the rest of the world

Cape Town - Frequent load shedding has rippled across South Africa since November, but how bad is it compared to other countries? Fin24 finds out.

Across the world, countries are dealing with an average of 5.5 power outages a month, according to World Bank data.

These outages, which include both emergency power cuts and planned load shedding, last an average of up to three hours.

This is far less than South Africa is currently enduring - but it’s not necessarily fair to compare us with the developed world.

Who is the best off?

A more regional look reveals that high income countries within the OECD - which include Australia, much of Europe, Canada, the US and the UK - hardly suffer at all, with less than one outage a month, lasting less than half an hour.

Even high income countries outside the OECD only suffer from 1.3 outages a month, for up to an hour.

But beyond these rich countries, the performance slides.

And the worst?

By far the biggest sufferers are countries in the Middle East and North Africa, which according to the World Bank are hit with an average of 23.5 power outages a month.

That’s a power cut six days a week - lasting an average of 9.4 hours.

Beyond these areas of unrest, South Asia is the next worst off - where countries are hit with an average of 17 power outages a month lasting over an hour.

Sub-Saharan Africa by comparison, suffers far less - though notably we are still hit by more than the average 5.5 outages a month.

We suffer an average of 7.8 power outages a month, lasting around 5 hours each time.

And what’s happening in Africa?

South Africa has the ability to generate more power at an affordable level than the rest of the region - 10 times more than Nigeria, for example.

But the region overall delivers a fraction of the amount of electricity the rest of the world doles out - and that’s before load shedding is thrown into the mix.

A separate report from the World Bank on power tariffs in 2011, found that the whole sub-Saharan region of 48 countries - with a population of 800 million - generates roughly the same amount of power as Spain - which has a population of 45 million.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA): “The region’s energy resources are more than sufficient to meet the needs of its population, but...they are largely under-developed”.

How efficient is the region?

The World Bank’s 2011 report also looked at the efficiency of power supplies within Sub-Saharan Africa, scoring each country from 0 (worst) to 1.0 (best).

The average score across the region for efficiency was 0.82.

The countries which have achieved the 1.0 target of efficiency are: Cameroon, Chad, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi and the Republic of Congo and the Democratic of Congo.

Namibia, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Tanzania scored above the average, but below 1.0.

Meanwhile, South Africa is one of the countries named and shamed as not even achieving the average efficiency of Sub-Saharan Africa - we scored just 0.72 on efficiency.

Benin, Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe also failed to hit the average mark.

Eskom did not respond to Fin24’s request for data showing how many hours of electricity have been lost since the problems began in November last year.

A spokesperson for the company would only reveal that in the last financial year - ending in March 2014 - there were 15 load shedding incidents.

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