Where Businesses Charge for a Charge

Eight years ago, when Trevor Noah was the host of The Daily Show, he described a talk with his 91-year-old Grandma in South Africa. Told that she never watched his program because she had no electricity, he bought her a generator.

Now there is a second solution.

South African Electricity

During 2018, Quartz reported that people in urban areas (like where Trevor Noah’s Grandma lived) had no dependable source of electricity. Yes, they had power, but the rolling blackouts were unpredictable. (One online response is advice on how to drive without traffic lights. As you would expect, go slowly and treat every inoperative light as a stop sign.)

At a peak in 2023 when outages occurred during 300 days, the South African national power company, Eskom, says the situation has vastly improved. But still people need the charges they can get at their local barbershop.

It all begins locally with a gas station that has solar panels. Those panels charge the batteries that small businesses like barbershops rent to their customers. Then, in addition to selling whatever they produce (like haircuts) shop owners charge their customers for a charge. As a result, people bring their cell phones, TVs, small appliances to anyone offering the service.

The program offers batteries with 300 to 1,000 watt-hours. You can see part of a BPOWERd logo from BP:

In addition to the charging stations, customers rent small batteries that could cost them $2.25 a day (40 rand). Some say they use the batteries for a church service sound system, to run a music studio, and yes, grandmothers use it for their televison sets.

Our Bottom Line: Economic Growth

Long ago, Thomas Jefferson demonstrated why he needed light. You can see below how the length of the workday varied with the seasons. During July, more daylight meant they could increase their spinning:

Echoing Thomas Jefferson, with recent data from South Africa, researchers concluded that employment for smaller businesses and working hours for all establishments, large and small, depended on the power supply.

While we can hypothesize that outages affect economic growth through their impact on labor, we can be sure that they increase one man’s barbershop business..

My sources and more: Seeing this NY Times article, I remembered our post from 2018. From there, my up-to-date articles included Reuters, the South African government, and the OECD. Also, this academic paper about the labor impact came in handy.