South Africa: Enforced Blackouts Further Weigh on a Troubled Economy

For the second straight day, South African electricity consumers have had to contend with unexpected power cuts affecting businesses and households across the country. The embattled national electricity provider Eskom, which supplies about 95 percent of South Africa's electricity, ordered the outages in a maneuver called load shedding after failures at several generation plants endangered the integrity of the power grid. The cuts underscore the fragility of the South African electrical grid, saddled with aging and poorly maintained infrastructure, and may indicate a rough summer ahead as seasonal demand increases....