For years, scheduled power cuts became part of daily life in South Africa.

In Eskom’s 2024 financial year, South Africa experienced load shedding on 329 days.

In the financial year ending March 2026, that number fell to just four days — 26 hours in total.

At the same time, Eskom reported a second consecutive annual profit, with profit after tax rising from R14.0 billion to R30.3 billion.

So what actually changed?

The Biggest Change Was Better Plant Performance

South Africa did not solve load shedding simply by building an entirely new power system.

A large part of the improvement came from getting more useful output from the generation fleet already in place.

Eskom has spent several years implementing a Generation Recovery Plan focused on maintenance, reducing breakdowns and improving the availability of existing generating units.

By August 2026, Eskom reported a year-to-date Energy Availability Factor of 67.87%, its highest level in around six years.

Compared with three years earlier, Eskom said improved plant performance had effectively returned about 6,873 MW of generating capacity to the grid.

Eskom’s recovery shows how improved asset availability can translate directly into fewer power interruptions and lower emergency-generation costs.

Fewer Breakdowns Also Meant Less Diesel

When Eskom’s coal fleet could not meet demand, one emergency option was to run open-cycle gas turbines using diesel.

That helped keep the system operating.

It was also expensive.

As generation reliability improved, Eskom needed those emergency plants far less often.

By late August 2026, the company said diesel expenditure had fallen by R4.89 billion, or 82.38%, year on year.

Reliability Has an Economic Value

Load shedding became much more than an inconvenience for South Africa.

Factories lost production time. Retailers and offices had to run backup generators. Cold storage, mines, workshops and small businesses spent money simply to keep normal operations running.

Eskom cited estimates from South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research suggesting that the economic cost of load shedding reached as much as R2.8 trillion in 2023.

That helps explain why four days versus 329 days matters far beyond the utility sector.

But Eskom’s Problems Have Not Disappeared

The turnaround is significant, but it would be premature to describe the story as “problem solved.”

Electricity sales volumes fell 6.2% to 178 TWh during the year.

Industrial demand was particularly weak, while more customers adopted embedded self-generation and energy-efficiency measures.

Eskom also continues to face a major municipal-debt problem.

Municipal arrears reached R111.6 billion at the end of the financial year and had increased to roughly R119 billion by June 2026.

From Shortage to Surplus?

Perhaps the most surprising sign of how quickly conditions have changed is Eskom’s estimate that South Africa could have around 2–3 GW of surplus production capacity over the next few years.

That is almost the opposite of the capacity shortages that dominated the electricity debate only a few years ago.

But surplus generation does not remove the need for investment.

Eskom plans to increase annual capital expenditure from around R45 billion in FY2026 to more than R70 billion from FY2029, with major investment still required in generation reliability, transmission and distribution infrastructure.