South African solar energy company Wetility has launched a new report and an interactive tool, revealing significant disparities in grid reliability across the country's municipalities. The "2025 Energy Resilience Report" shifts the focus from national loadshedding to localized power failures driven by infrastructure challenges. This initiative provides residents with a detailed profile of outages in their specific area, empowering them with crucial data.
Unveiling Local Grid Realities
The comprehensive report analyzes data from 57 municipalities, capturing over 91,000 unique outages throughout 2025. It establishes a national average outage duration of 12.1 hours, but this figure masks an enormous range in performance. Some areas experience failures lasting less than two hours, while others face blackouts exceeding a full day.
According to Wetility's Chief Commercial Officer, Franta Pour, the data confirms that grid reliability must be viewed as a local issue. He attributes the wide variability to municipal pressures like aging infrastructure, cable theft, and revenue collection constraints. The dataset aims to provide essential visibility for municipalities, businesses, and households to make better-informed decisions.
A Tale of Two Grids
The report highlights a significant gap between the best and worst-performing municipalities, creating a postcode lottery for reliable electricity. For instance, the iLembe district in KwaZulu-Natal resolved nearly 83% of its outages within two hours. In stark contrast, the nearby Amajuba district recorded an average outage duration of 18.6 hours.
Major metropolitan areas are not immune to these localized challenges, underscoring the widespread nature of the problem. The City of Tshwane saw an average outage duration of 15.6 hours, while the City of Johannesburg recorded over 10,800 outage events, the highest of any municipality. These figures show that even economic hubs face severe grid instability beyond national loadshedding schedules.
Driving Demand for Energy Independence
These findings help explain the sustained demand for solar and battery systems, even as national loadshedding has eased. With households facing an average of six to nine unpredictable local outages per month, the primary driver has shifted from scheduled cuts to unreliable supply. This unpredictability, combined with continuously rising electricity tariffs, makes alternative energy solutions increasingly attractive.
To address this need for information, Wetility has launched a free, interactive lookup tool on its website. It allows anyone to search their municipality and view a detailed outage profile, including average duration and monthly trends. The tool is designed to help consumers assess their local risk and determine the appropriate capacity for an alternative energy system.
Ultimately, Wetility's new report and data tool bring unprecedented transparency to South Africa's complex and fragmented energy landscape. By placing localized data directly into the hands of consumers, the company highlights deep-seated infrastructure issues across various municipalities. This initiative empowers individuals and businesses to pursue greater energy resilience and fosters a necessary shift towards energy independence.