Eskom fixed the fleet and the customers left
South Africa generated less electricity in June than in any June in at least seven years, including June 2020, when much of the economy was shut under…
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South Africa generated less electricity in June than in any June in at least seven years, including June 2020, when much of the economy was shut under Covid-19 restrictions. It did so while Eskom’s power stations were performing better than at any point since 2017.
Data published by Statistics South Africa on Thursday shows electricity generation fell 8.1% year on year in June to 18.9TWh, a 13th consecutive month of year-on-year decline. The unadjusted index of generation volumes came in at 89.8 against a 2019 base of 100, the weakest June in the seven years of data shown in the release.
None of this reflects a return of the plant failures that defined the load-shedding years. Eskom said this week that the country has gone 441 consecutive days without load shedding, that its energy availability factor hit 82.04% on 26 July, its best single day since 2017, and that unplanned outages in the week to 30 July averaged 47.8% less than in the same week a year earlier. Demand was met 100% of the time between 1 April and 30 July.
The utility has, in other words, repaired its fleet into a shrinking market.
The squeeze shows up in Eskom’s share of what the country produces. Stats SA publishes each of its two series — electricity generated, and electricity available for distribution inside South Africa — twice over: once for all producers and once for the national electricity supplier alone. The second is a subset of the first, so subtracting one from the other gives everything produced by everyone else, meaning independent power producers (IPPs), municipal generators and private plants that fall inside the survey.
Generation is the cleaner of the two measures. Eskom’s power stations produced 92.1TWh in the first half of 2026, down 9.5% year on year, against a 7% decline for all producers combined. On TechCentral’s calculation from the Stats SA tables, that leaves non-Eskom generation at 15.6TWh for the six months, up 10.4% or 1.47TWh on the same period last year. Eskom’s share of everything generated in the country fell from 87.8% to 85.5%, a loss of 2.3 percentage points in a single year. In June alone, Eskom produced 16.32TWh of the national total of 18.9TWh, or 86.3%.
The distribution series moves the same way. Stats SA derives it by taking generation, adding imports and subtracting exports and the electricity power stations burn running themselves. On that basis, Eskom’s figure fell 6.3% to 83.9TWh in the first half against a 3.9% decline nationally, taking its share from 86.7% to 84.6%.
Read: Eskom’s diesel bill falls 86% as breakdowns hit eight-year low
Put the trends together and the shape is one familiar to any regulated utility under pressure:
Spreading those costs over fewer units means higher tariffs, and higher tariffs strengthen the case for every customer with a roof, a balance sheet or a wheeling agreement to leave.
The survey cannot see all of that. Stats SA draws on a sample of 24 enterprises, supplemented with data the nationa…