[This is great news. It means Whites and businesses are using less and less Eskom electricity. The entire nation is basically going off the grid. With Blacks being the main ones needing ESKOM, it also means the Blacks will eventually be without electricity. Jan]

Eskom is in a “death spiral” that was predicted by three of its former leaders going as far back as seven years.

According to data from the National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA), Eskom’s year-to-date residual energy demand declined substantially compared to the same period last year.

The latest published system status outlook showed that Eskom’s energy demand in the first 21 weeks of 2026 was 10% below 2025’s levels.

Between 1 January and 24 May 2026, Eskom recorded 69,492 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity demand, compared with 77,030 over the same period in 2025.

Eskom has announced that it expects energy sales of 179,000GWh for the financial year ending March 2026.

If that forecast was accurate, it would be the first time since 2000 that its demand drops below 180,000GWh.

Eskom’s average hourly electricity demand is about 4,000MW lower than it was in 2021. That is equivalent to the demand it sheds from the grid during stage 4 load shedding.

Two factors have driven the decline. Firstly, a large number of energy-intensive customers, including smelters and factories, have closed down.

However, many of these facilities shut down before the more recent decline in demand. Experts believe that rapid adoption of self-generation — primarily solar power — is to blame for the recent declines.

Between 2018 and the first quarter of 2026, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa registered over 19,300MW of generating capacity across power plants with outputs greater than 100kWp.

In addition, the NTCSA has estimated that the capacity of smaller “behind-the-meter” rooftop solar generation increased by more than 5,000MW between 2022 and 2026.

Eskom recently acknowledged that its lower sales volumes were putting pressure on tariffs, which have increased by more than 1,100% since the load-shedding crisis began in 2007.

A large proportion of the company’s operating and maintenance costs are fixed, meaning that a decline in energy usage does not translate into a drop in costs.

An unbreakable cycle

Dawie Roodt, Efficient Group chief economist
The power utility’s customer base is shrinking. If it cannot reduce costs, it must increase tariffs exponentially to avoid losses.

The increased tariffs push more households and businesses to invest in self-generation, reducing their reliance on the grid, cutting further into Eskom’s sales.

This cycle of price increases and sales declines has been dubbed a “death spiral,” and respected economist Dawie Roodt believes it is unstoppable because Eskom cannot lower tariffs or cut costs.

“Eskom needs the money to run an inefficient institution and to repay its debt,” Roodt said. “There is no way Eskom will accept or survive lower tariffs.”

Eskom has had plenty of warning, with three of its own former chief executive officers flagging the impending death spiral. The most recent was André de Ruyter.

He described the death spiral as “well-lit” after his ouster in early 2023 following a bombshell interview on eNCA in which he alleged senior officials were involved in crimes affecting Eskom’s performance.

In an interview with Business Day Spotlight in December 2023, De Ruyter also explained how Eskom’s cost path was unsustainable.

“If you extrapolate from current trends, Eskom will eventually be left with a customer base of people who cannot afford electricity and therefore don’t pay for it,” he said.

However, De Ruyter cannot be credited for being the first to warn about the dangerous cycle Eskom is trapped in.

His predecessor, Phakamani Hadebe, first used the term “death spiral” for the cycle about four years earlier.

In July 2019, the month before he resigned from the company after only taking the reins a year earlier, Hadebe raised concerns over Eskom’s rising costs and decreasing revenue.

“We are now facing the death spiral, and this is because of a number of our clients moving off the grid,” Hadebe said.

Tariff hikes and salary increases continue unabated

Phakamani Hadebe, former Eskom CEO. Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg
It should be noted that in the year before Hadebe left, Eskom recorded 208,319GWh in energy sales, over 16% more than expected in 2025.

Private electricity generation was also still in its infancy in South Africa. Another former CEO — Matshela Koko — also warned that Eskom’s declining sales volumes were an existential crisis for the power utility.

In a YouTube interview in December 2023, Koko said that if Eskom’s volumes continued to decline at the rate up to that year, it would mean the end of the utility within a decade.

“The writing is on the wall. This is what is called a death spiral. This Eskom is dying,” Koko said. Over two years have passed since Koko’s statement, and the power utility’s energy sales have only worsened.

In addition, it has imposed further above-inflation electricity tariff hikes and increased employee remuneration and headcount.

A recent MyBroadband analysis found Eskom paid its employees R231,985 for every GWh of energy generated in 2025, compared with R17,892 in 1994.

While the cost remained relatively aligned with inflation up to 2007, it spiralled out of control after the load-shedding crisis hit.

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/650223-andre-de-ruyters-warning-about-eskom-is-becoming-a-reality.html