When the grid can’t keep up: how South African laboratories handle power outages

A power cut hits Johannesburg, South Africa, during a load-shedding period in February 2023. Credit: Leon Sadiki/Bloomberg via Getty As a scheduled blackout hits in the afternoon heat of Makhanda, it elicits a moment of crisis inside the National Research Foundation’s South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (NRF-SAIAB). Inside thousands of glass jars on kilometres of mobile shelving, more than one million specimens sit vulnerable. Most of the institute’s collection of fish, amphibians and cephalopods, comprising lineages shaped by 400 million years of evolution, float in 70% ethanol at temperatures around 18 °C. If temperatures rise even a few degrees past this threshold, the preservative becomes a severe fire hazard. Given that summers in the region can exceed 30 °C, active cooling is essential to prevent the archive from turning into a giant fuel tank. The lights blink out, plunging the rooms into darkness. For a minute, the crucial air conditioning falls silent, before backup generators slowly rattle to life. The collection, the largest of its kind in Africa and home to rare specimens of coelacanths, a group of fish that were once thought extinct, sits on a knife-edge between preservation and ruination. These planned blackouts, known as load-shedding, reached their peak in South Africa in 2023, with power cuts occurring on nine in every ten days. …