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South Africa's load shedding history
Since April 2022 Eskom has shed 27 082 GWh of demand over 12 207 hours on 626 days. The crisis peaked through 2022 and 2023, eased sharply from mid 2024, and 2026 has seen none at all so far. The worst single day remains 21 February 2023, when 122.8 GWh was cut.
What counts as load shedding here
These figures count Eskom's manual load reduction only, the scheduled outages households and businesses experience. Eskom also curtails large industrial customers who are paid to be interruptible, and that demand management is reported separately on this site, never as load shedding. One stage of load shedding is roughly 1 000 MW, so a peak cut of 6 800 MW corresponds to about stage 7.
Year by year
| Year | GWh shed | Hours | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 7 726 | 3 525 | 191 |
| 2023 | 16 562 | 6 837 | 335 |
| 2024 | 2 404 | 1 643 | 83 |
| 2025 | 390 | 202 | 17 |
| 2026 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Every month with load shedding
| Month | GWh | Hours | Days | Worst day GWh |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 2022 | 317.3 | 200 | 11 | 70.8 |
| May 2022 | 318.9 | 220 | 26 | 34.9 |
| June 2022 | 480.5 | 186 | 11 | 80.1 |
| July 2022 | 1002.6 | 412 | 22 | 84.8 |
| August 2022 | 128.9 | 75 | 7 | 46.3 |
| September 2022 | 1543.2 | 570 | 25 | 103.2 |
| October 2022 | 955.8 | 536 | 28 | 66.0 |
| November 2022 | 1027.4 | 628 | 30 | 66.3 |
| December 2022 | 1951.5 | 698 | 31 | 112.0 |
| January 2023 | 2076.4 | 744 | 31 | 97.9 |
| February 2023 | 2159.4 | 661 | 28 | 122.8 |
| March 2023 | 1514.7 | 663 | 30 | 90.7 |
| April 2023 | 1970.8 | 692 | 30 | 109.4 |
| May 2023 | 2042.0 | 731 | 31 | 96.7 |
| June 2023 | 712.1 | 361 | 30 | 83.5 |
| July 2023 | 1483.7 | 582 | 31 | 98.5 |
| August 2023 | 1004.2 | 658 | 31 | 60.4 |
| September 2023 | 1508.0 | 591 | 30 | 107.3 |
| October 2023 | 315.5 | 259 | 20 | 33.8 |
| November 2023 | 1218.2 | 630 | 30 | 89.2 |
| December 2023 | 556.9 | 265 | 13 | 63.3 |
| January 2024 | 691.4 | 576 | 28 | 42.2 |
| February 2024 | 1152.3 | 637 | 29 | 81.0 |
| March 2024 | 560.3 | 430 | 26 | 41.5 |
| January 2025 | 12.3 | 7 | 1 | 12.3 |
| February 2025 | 245.9 | 114 | 7 | 83.3 |
| March 2025 | 95.5 | 55 | 5 | 49.1 |
| April 2025 | 8.2 | 8 | 1 | 8.2 |
| May 2025 | 28.2 | 18 | 3 | 9.9 |
Calculated from Eskom's published hourly data. The dashboard chart shows the same record month by month, and each month page carries the detail.