February 9, 2020

The South African Data Center Market and the Eskom Threat

South Africa is facing an acute electricity crisis. Since last September, South African electricity customers have been subjected to wide-scale load-shedding (a euphemism for scheduled power outages) as power utility Eskom struggled to manage an aging power plant fleet. On December 9, the outages reached extreme proportions, with Eskom taking offline 6GW (~15% of its available capacity) of power to avert a collapse of the entire grid.