On 16 May 2026, South Africa's power utility Eskom marked a full year without loadshedding (rolling blackouts), the first such run since 2018. The milestone is real and confirmed by Eskom and independent reporting. It's often framed as a renewables success story. The honest answer is: partly, but we can't fully confirm how much.

What we could confirm: Eskom's own figures show diesel expenditure (running its open-cycle gas turbine fleet at Ankerlig and Gourikwa) dropped sharply, from roughly R33.3 billion to R6.4 billion over three years. That's a real, large reduction in diesel reliance, a genuine improvement.

What we couldn't confirm: a drop in diesel spending isn't the same as diesel going to zero. Neither Eskom's public releases nor independent reporting we could find give a clear, current figure for how many hours those diesel-fired plants are still running to help hold the line. That means the honest, responsible answer to "is this a renewables win or a diesel-backup win" is: genuinely unclear from what's publicly available.

The bottom line: the 365-day milestone is real and worth celebrating. Whether to credit renewables, better maintenance, reduced diesel reliance, or some mix of all three, isn't something we can responsibly claim to know from the public numbers, and neither, frankly, can most of the coverage repeating this story.