Every month the Uganda Electricity Distribution Company publishes the parts of the network it will switch off for planned work, and runs a live page of unplanned outages. Read one at a time the notices are a line in a WhatsApp group. Read together, across eighteen months, they describe a system.
This analysis parses every planned-shutdown notice published between May 2025 and October 2026, geocodes the places named, and overlays them on rainfall, terrain, satellite imagery, fifty-five years of urban-growth data and the grid itself.
In Numbers
- 2,181 customer-affecting planned shutdowns in eighteen months, about 121 a month.
- Planned work alone costs the average customer an estimated 3.2 hours without power every month.
- Roughly 25,000 MWh of energy not served over the period, from planned work alone.
- An estimated UGX 186 billion of economic loss in eighteen months, with a plausible range of UGX 70 to 580 billion.
The full analysis, with the maps, the monthly series, the hotspot statistics and the method behind each figure, is published on the author's Substack.