Aerial video of power cuts in South Africa

South African power cuts worsened on January 11 as struggling state utility Eskom said it would extend its worst-ever outages until further notice. The "Stage 6" power cuts mean six to eight hours a day without power for most South Africans and require up to 6,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity to be shed from the national grid. They are a major source of public frustration with the governing African National Congress party, whose support among voters is sliding, and a brake on economic growth in Africa's most industrialized nation. Eskom has a nominal generation capacity of roughly 46,000 MW, but on Jan. 11, more than 23,000 MW of that was offline because of breakdowns or planned repairs. The country witnessed more than 200 days of power cuts in 2022, the most in a calendar year, and the situation could get even worse in 2023.