Intermittent Power Outages and Safety Perceptions during an Electricity Supply Crisis: Evidence from South Africa

An increasing number of countries experience intermittent power outages which affect well-being. This paper fills a research gap by analyzing the effect of intermittent power outages on perceptions of safety, utilizing the South Africa Quality of Life Survey as a data source. The study employs seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) and ordered logistic (ordered logit) regression to assess the effect of power outage frequency on perceptions of safety: government security, daytime safety, nighttime safety, and home safety. The study found that more frequent exposure to power outages is associated with more negative perceptions of safety for all measures except for daytime safety in both estimation models. The research has political and policy implications. From a political perspective, frequent power outages worsen perceptions of government, which may translate into political actions as well as affect election results. From a policy perspective, the country should transform the current centralized electricity system into a locally distributed one based on renewable energy. Finally, the negative effects of intermittent power outages encompass energy justice, which emphasizes the provision of financial and physical government support to low-income households.