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.

Under pressure

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%.

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Put the trends together and the shape is one familiar to any regulated utility under pressure:

Total demand is falling;
Eskom’s share of what remains is falling faster; and
The volumes it loses are the ones that carry its fixed costs — a coal fleet, a transmission network and a debt burden that do not shrink when sales do.

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 national supplier provides on independent producers and on wheeling, and excludes any enterprise with total generating capacity below 500kW. That leaves most small-scale embedded generation — and rooftop solar above all — outside the picture entirely. Whatever the numbers show about customers leaving the system, the real figure is larger.

Two further caveats apply to the split itself. It is a producer-side attribution and says nothing about who buys the power or whose wires carry it, so it is not a direct measure of grid defection: renewables built under the government’s procurement programme sell to Eskom and travel across its network, yet sit in the residual. The volumes moving through arrangements such as Cape Town’s pooled wheeling of renewable electricity are the part of the shift the numbers can see.

As TechCentral has reported, the end of load shedding has exposed a different set of problems, among them stalled market reform, curtailment of independent power producers and a backlog in compensation payments owed to them.

Some of the missing volume never had a domestic buyer. South Africa’s electricity exports have collapsed, and in June the country pulled in more power across its borders than it sent out, a striking reversal for a grid that was still a substantial net supplier to the region a year ago.

The Stats SA data shows 690GWh of electricity flowed into South Africa in June, against 469GWh flowing out. Inflows were up 31.7% year on year while outflows fell 62.3%. Stats SA does not name Eskom, referring throughout to the national electricity supplier, but all the metered cross-border flow in the release is attributed to it.

Regional demand

The shift is not a one-month anomaly. Over the first half of 2026, outflows fell 35.7% to 4.54TWh while inflows rose 17.4% to 4.12TWh. That leaves net exports of just 419GWh for the six months, down from 3.55TWh in the same period of 2025, a decline of 88%.

It also resolves a puzzle in the headline numbers. Electricity distributed inside the country fell only 2.8% in June, to 17.67TWh, against the 8.1% drop in generation. The gap is largely power that used to leave the country. On TechCentral’s calculation, the drop in June exports accounts for close to half of the year-on-year fall in generation that month, a bigger single component than the decline in domestic consumption.

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The same arithmetic explains why Eskom’s distribution figure fell by less than its generation figure. Its output dropped 9.61TWh over the six months, but it exported 2.52TWh less, used 884GWh less running its own plant and imported 610GWh more, which together clawed back most of the difference and left the distributed figure 5.59TWh lower.

Part of the explanation lies north of the Limpopo. Regional demand for emergency power spiked during the El Niño drought that crippled hydropower at Lake Kariba, and those conditions have eased. At the end of October last year, the Zambezi River Authority allocated 30 billion cubic metres of water for generation at Kariba in 2026, split equally between Zambia’s Zesco and Zimbabwe’s ZPC, citing a normal to above-normal rainfall forecast for the 2025/2026 season. Better regional hydrology means less need for expensive imported power from South Africa.

Eskom’s own numbers had until recently pointed the other way. In its interim results for the first six months of FY2026, covering April to September 2025, the utility reported international sales up 4% to 6.8TWh even as local sales fell 3% to 86TWh. The Stats SA border data suggests that export cushion has since disappeared.

However, there is one source of new demand large enough to change the arithmetic: South Africa’s data centre pipeline, which could add many hundreds of megawatts to national electricity demand if all the announced projects are built. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media