GoKawiilA 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. As the state utility, Eskom, continues to struggle to meet demand with its ageing coal power plants, electricity is rationed to local distributors through a rotating schedule to prevent grid collapse. In Makhanda, the grid is further destabilized by frequent theft of municipal wiring, forcing institutions such as the NRF-SAIAB to adapt to both scheduled and unscheduled losses.
Even short blackouts are a profound threat to institutions. “Inadequate cooling and electrical faults can have catastrophic consequences,” says collections manager Nkosinathi Mazungula, citing the devastating 2018 fire that destroyed more than 90% of the National Museum of Brazil’s archives in Rio de Janeiro after an air-conditioning unit short-circuited. Infrastructure that is considered reliable can fail quickly without adequate safeguards; the NRF-SAIAB would have faced a similar catastrophe if any of its backup generators failed.
For years, staff were forced to babysit the facility at all times. “Teams would come to site after hours and on weekends,” recalls Wesley Phillip, the institute’s IT systems manager. They would ensure that the air conditioning and other systems remained functional and helped to provide peace of mind, he says. That vulnerability began to change in August 2024, when the National Research Foundation and the Department of Science and Innovation provided a 7-million-rand (around US$420,000) investment for an on-site solar and battery backup power system. Capable of supplying the institute’s full power needs for four hours, or up to seven hours of critical cooling without generators, the system turned grid independence into a core feature rather than a contingency plan, explains Phillip.
South Africa’s ‘rolling blackouts’, organized to keep the grid working, have created issues for scientists.Credit: Joerg Boethling/Alamy
This effort to save individual collections is part of a broader trend towards building laboratory resilience across South Africa, and has growing relevance for facilities worldwide facing unstable infrastructure. From new university policies to specialized fail-safes, South Africa’s researchers are pioneering ways to keep the science moving even when the power is off.
Cashing out
Load-shedding can particularly stifle DNA research, in which uninterrupted sequencer runs are paramount. “Often electricity disruptions stop your reaction midway,” says Alida de Flamingh, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who completed much of her doctoral work in collaboration with the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “You have one chance, five or six hours gone. It can significantly impact the amount of research you can do.”
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