A publicly available dataset reveals wide disparities in grid reliability across South Africa’s municipalities — with the average power outage lasting under 2 hours in some areas and exceeding 24 hours in others.

The data, drawn from real-time telemetry across a national network of solar and battery installations, is published in the Wetility 2025 Energy Resilience Report. A new interactive lookup tool launched by solar energy company Wetility allows users to search a municipality and view a detailed outage profile, including average duration, monthly trends and how an area compares to the national average.

The dataset covers over 57 municipalities across all nine provinces, measuring grid outages at the point of delivery — capturing failures across the full chain of generation, transmission and distribution.

Wetility shared the following key findings at the municipality level:

City of Tshwane: Average outage duration of 15.6 hours. 69.5% of all outages lasted longer than 8 hours.

City of Johannesburg: Over 10 800 outage events recorded in 2025 — the highest of any municipality in the dataset.

Waterberg District (Limpopo): Nearly 80% of outages exceeded 8 hours, with an average duration of 16.4 hours — among the longest in the country.

iLembe District (KwaZulu-Natal): 82.9% of outages resolved within 2 hours, with an average duration of just 2.0 hours.

Amajuba District (KwaZulu-Natal): Average outage lasted 18.6 hours, with 82.7% exceeding 8 hours.

Wetility notes that the findings suggest that, even as national generation performance improved, many households continued to experience localised power-supply reliability challenges.

“Many municipalities are operating under significant pressure — from ageing infrastructure and cable theft to revenue collection constraints — and that reality is reflected in the variability we see. What this dataset provides is visibility: a way for municipalities, businesses and households to better understand local conditions and make more informed decisions,” said Wetility chief commercial officer Franta Pour.

Pour noted that the gap between best- and worst-performing municipalities is significant: “We’re not looking at marginal differences. In some areas, outages are resolved relatively quickly, while in others they can persist for extended periods. Where you live has a material impact on reliability and for most households, that reality has historically not been visible.”

The company notes that the data helps explain why demand for solar and battery systems in South Africa has remained strong even as loadshedding has diminished. For households experiencing six to nine unplanned outages a month, the driver is no longer scheduled cuts but unpredictability, combined with rising electricity costs.

The municipality lookup tool is available as a free service and is publicly accessible on the Wetility website.