‘It’s a lot’: How electricity price hikes affect SA’s youth

Electricity is getting more expensive, and South Africans are looking for ways to ease the pain of paying more for their electricity units every year.

Eskom’s electricity price hike increased by 12.72% on 1 July this year and will remain in effect until 30 June 2025.

The Citizen asked the youth in Johannesburg about how these electricity price hikes have affected them.

“The cost of living in South Africa is very high and even paying for rent itself, excluding all other things like water and electricity, is very expensive. So it’s very overwhelming at times and it is a lot,” said Angela Khumalo.

WATCH: How youth feels about the electricity price increase

Eskom’s load reduction

Although Eskom has suspended load shedding, some areas supplied by City Power still grapple with power outages.

Johannesburg and Tshwane have experienced electricity supply constraints in recent months, which resulted in the implementation of load reduction.

According to Eskom, load reduction is a long-established process that it uses in specific areas when there is sufficient electricity available, but a transformer’s integrity is at risk due to overloading.

About 94% of the total overloaded transformers are in these areas as a result of electricity theft and indiscriminate use of electricity.

“Overloaded transformers as a result of electricity theft present a serious risk to human life, we only implement load reduction as a very last resort for the shortest periods possible after all other options have been exhausted,” said Monde Bala, Group Executive for Distribution

The lack of electricity has created additional costs for most South Africans.

“We pay a lot of money there’s not even a backup generator so when there’s no electricity we don’t have a backup but we pay more than 80,000 for the whole year,” said Khumalo.

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City Power electricity outages

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena told The Citizen: “Other significant causes include network overload, cable theft, and vandalism. From July to mid-August, 55% of outages were due to equipment failures, while 15% were due to network overload, often resulting from illegal connections and meter tampering.”

City Power recorded more than 1,000 open calls from residents in the areas affected by the outages.

According to Mangena, the average response time for closing calls and resolving outages in each service delivery centre (SDC) is 24 hours.

However, Mangena added that this could sometimes stretch to 48 hours depending on the availability of resources.

Additional reporting by Enkosi Selane

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