Every Saturday morning, my parents and I talk to our friends in Texas over Zoom.

After that, the day unfolds as usual – boiling the kettle for a second cup of coffee, putting on a load of laundry, checking emails, reheating some leftovers for lunch, and maybe heading out to go grocery shopping. Some of us will spend the evening streaming our favourite TV shows, movies, or watching a live game happening on the other side of the world. We’ll flip on the lights without a second thought, maybe ask Alexa to play some music while we cook.

At the end of the night, we’ll go to sleep in our comfortable beds, maybe with the air conditioning at just the right temperature.

It’s easy to forget that none of this happens by accident. It all depends on affordable, reliable energy.

Behind every small comfort is a vast, invisible engine – an electric heartbeat that pulses through cities and towns, carried by wires, fuelled by choices, shaped by policy. When that heartbeat falters, everything changes. The lights go out. The connections break. We remember, all at once, how much we’ve come to rely on energy we rarely notice.

We take all of this for granted – but we shouldn’t.

Because the reliable energy we depend on is not guaranteed, even here.

We all know that blackouts are an infrequent occurrence, usually caused by extreme weather events. The thought of regular, frequent power outages is completely alien to most people in the developed world. But, there are indications that this experience may be coming to us soon.

Multiple Australian states are facing potential energy shortages.

Earlier this year, South Australia brought two mothballed diesel generators online due to concerns that the grid would be unable to meet energy demands over the summer. To avoid blackouts, NSW Premier Chris Minns has encouraged businesses and homes to reduce their energy usage during peak hours. In response to power outages during a recent summer heatwave, WA Premier Roger Cook stated that such outages were simply ‘part and parcel’ of the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

This all begs the question, what does a country with an unreliable power grid look like?

We don’t have to imagine what Australia would look like with regular blackouts South Africa gives us a pretty good idea of what the future may hold.

Due to a lack of investment, ageing infrastructure, chronic mismanagement, and corruption, South Africa’s energy grid is unable to meet the country’s energy demands. Because of this, Eskom (South Africa’s state-owned energy provider) has been forced to resort to ‘load shedding.’ Load shedding – a sanitised term for regularly scheduled blackouts – have become necessary to prevent the South African energy grid from collapsing. This energy rationing began in 2007 and continues to the present day.

To say that this has been bad for South Africa’s economy would be the understatement of the century.

In 2023, the Development Bank of South Africa estimated that load shedding has reduced the potential size of South Africa’s economy by 20 per cent since 2007, and that the annual cost to GDP sits around 1-1.3 per cent. This translates into a daily economic loss of anywhere from $50 million to $230 million USD.

The unreliable energy grid has also spooked investors, with all three major rating agencies giving South Africa ‘junk status’, which has all but eliminated injections of new capital into the economy. A lack of economic growth due to the unreliable energy grid means that South Africa has been unable to resolve its extreme unemployment problem, which is one of the highest in the world.

South Africa’s ongoing period of economic stagnation following the post-Apartheid boom is generally believed to have begun around 2009, just two years after Eskom started load shedding.

Load shedding has effects that go beyond the economy. Hospitals in South Africa are frequently hampered by power outages, particularly in rural areas. Health care workers are forced to make frequent use of phone lights to see what they are doing, and cooler boxes to keep medications from spoiling. It has also been reported that crime, which is already an out-of-control issue in South Africa, tends to spike during load shedding events. And we think that we have it tough.

So, you may be asking, what does this have to do with Australia?

Data from the past month indicates that almost 65 per cent of Australia’s electricity came from coal and gas. In some states, over 70 per cent of electricity is generated by coal and gas. Western Australia is one such state and is planning to shut down all of its coal-fired power plants before 2030. Other Australian states are planning to shut down their coal generation within similar time frames. It’s unclear how the government plans to make up for this massive gap in the energy grid so quickly, and it seems that they are trying their hardest to simply ignore the issue in the hope that it will go away.

Even renewable energy developers have been warning that the coal closure date is untenable.

All of this indicates that, barring a change in policy, there is a good chance that Australia’s energy grid will be unable to meet the country’s demands in the near future.

This will almost certainly disrupt the federal government’s ambitious ‘Future Made in Australia’ agenda, as manufacturing has been one the hardest-hit sectors of the South African economy due to load shedding.

But that’s okay; it’s not like we have a problem with economic growth or diversity.

It should be stressed that this piece isn’t about renewables vs fossil fuels (or nuclear), it’s about what the future looks like without reliable energy.

In that light, our lawmakers need to ask a few hard questions of themselves.

Are we going to realistically be able to make up for the loss of coal power generation with renewables in the time we have given ourselves?

Are we going to be able to reinvigorate our economy with a potentially diminished energy grid?

Is a 1 per cent reduction in global emissions worth risking Australia’s future prosperity, particularly when one considers that any reductions we make will almost certainly be offset by new coal power stations being built in China?

One hopes that common sense will prevail. Unfortunately, the only thing scarcer than energy in South Africa might be common sense in Canberra.

John Ogilvie is the policy advisor for Mannwest Group.