While State-owned Eskom on March 13 said it had achieved more than 300 consecutive days without needing to implement loadshedding, a milestone reflecting a real and hard-won recovery in generation performance, a new national dataset indicates that, while loadshedding has receded, the lived experience of unreliable power has not.

The ‘Wetility 2025 Energy Resilience Report’, based on real-time telemetry from a national network of solar and battery systems, recorded 91 934 unique grid power outages across South Africa in 2025.

These are primarily unplanned interruptions that shut down shops, spoil stock and leave households without warning or recourse.

In effect, the report notes that, while South Africa has stabilised generation, reliable end-to-end delivery often has gaps.

At a national level, Wetility says, Eskom’s recovery is evident, noting that generation has stabilised, loadshedding has dropped sharply and key performance indicators have improved.

However, it posits that between generation and the end-user lies a complex, ageing and increasingly strained distribution network, one that is far less visible and less well measured.

Hence, Wetility systems detect all grid failures and measure whether electricity actually reaches homes and businesses reliably, across the generation, transmission and distribution chain.

Considering the reduction in loadshedding, the company posits that what it may be revealing is a growing disconnect between power generated and power delivered.

“We are now seeing two parallel trends.

“One where generation is improving and another where there are many localised failures. For customers, though, that distinction is less important, because the only reality that matters is whether the lights stay on,” says Wetility group president Ikenna Oguguo.

The Wetility data shows that, on average, households experienced six to nine grid outages a month in 2025.

During this time, solar systems provided backup power and enabled Wetility customers to avoid interruption.

However, for users without a solar system, it meant an average of about 73 to 132 hours without grid power every month.

One of the report’s most significant findings is the duration of outage, with more than half of all outages – 58.1% – having lasted longer than eight hours.

The company notes that the average outage lasted 12.1 hours, with fewer than a quarter resolved within two hours.

Additionally, performance varied dramatically by region.

Wetility points out that the average outage duration differed across provinces, from 14 hours in Gauteng to 6.6 hours in the Eastern Cape.

Wetility says these are not marginal differences.

"A household in Gauteng faces a fundamentally different energy reality than one in the Eastern Cape.

“When we designed systems for loadshedding, we were solving for short, scheduled gaps. That era is over. The outages households face today are longer, less predictable and vary by region. Our design philosophy has to evolve with that reality,” says Oguguo.

The company notes that outages were recorded every month of 2025 across all nine provinces, highlighting that February 2025 had been the most severe month nationally, with households having experienced an average of 8.8 outages and 131.8 hours without grid power, which coincides with a month that involved both loadshedding and non-loadshedding outages.

However, no month was outage-free, Wetility points out.

The company notes that this persistence and the long outage durations suggest that outages may no longer be primarily driven by generation constraints, but by deeper structural issues in the distribution network, including ageing infrastructure, municipal maintenance backlogs, cable theft and equipment failure.

The company says this data helps explain a key market trend, noting that demand for solar and battery systems has remained strong even as loadshedding has declined.

Hence, the company argues that the driver is no longer scheduled outages, but rather unpredictability.

“What we have been solving for is the tension between cost and resilience.

“When power is unreliable for 70 to 130 hours a month while tariffs are increasing, customers need certainty in both reliability and affordability,” says Oguguo.

“With 58.1% of outages exceeding eight hours, the question is no longer whether to subscribe to solar or not. It is what size the system needs to be to overcome the outages faced while also saving,” Wetility adds in a press release.