The less intense blackouts boil down to five factors. Cooler winter months bode well for the performance of Eskom's coal-fired power plants. Renewable energy (mainly wind) has generated a lot of electricity. The maintenance of Eskom's power stations has been reduced. Eskom is burning diesel. Also, intensive energy users, like mining companies, usually shut down their operations for maintenance.

How has Eskom managed to drastically reduce the intensity of blackouts from crippling Stage 6 to Stage 3 over the past two weeks?

Before the improvement in the electricity situation, South Africa was anticipating unprecedented Stage 8 blackouts -- or worse -- during this winter.

But households and industries have gone from not having electricity for 10 hours on average (depending on which parts of the country you are based in) to two hours.

It was predictable and expected that this would happen because Eskom's fleet of coal-fired power stations in Mpumalanga always performs better during colder winter months than in hot summer conditions. This has been the case going back seven years when looking at Eskom's energy availability factor (EAF), the main metric for assessing the performance of the power utility's 14 power stations.

An EAF refers to the average percentage of power stations available to dispatch energy at any one time. A higher EAF indicates that Eskom's power stations are performing well and also lowers the probability of higher blackout stages.

Data from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) show that over the past seven years, between 2016 and 2022, Eskom's power stations have produced a...