Mokadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he left his home outside Johannesburg, South Africa, to go to his job as a security guard, he had to turn back twice, first because he forgot his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be anxious: His boss had assigned him to guard an electricity substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gunmen. On this day in May 2021, Mokoena and his fellow guards were at the substation, nervously watching through the windshield of their truck as a group of armed men approached.
Mokoena took out his mobile phone and called his wife, the mother of his one-year-old daughter, and told her that a gang was coming for him. “I’m scared,” said Mokoena, who was not carrying a gun himself. “I think they are the same people who attacked our colleague.”
“Call your boss!” she told him.
Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic rifle. Mokoena’s partner jumped from the car but was killed by bullets. A third security guard nearby took cover and fired back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with a supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the perpetrators fled with about $1,600 worth of copper wire.
“We face these dangers every day,” a surviving guard later told a local journalist. “When we go on duty, we don’t know if we’ll ever be able to go home.”
In most places, electricity companies are a very boring business. But in South Africa, they’re under attack, literally. Heavily armed gangs are crippling the country’s energy infrastructure and claiming more and more lives. Nearly every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, trains are halted, water is cut off and hospitals are forced to close. All because thieves are after copper, the material that carries electricity.
The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electric everything”: running our cars, heating systems, factories, and every other machine on electricity instead of fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper. And lots of it. Copper is the rarest and most expensive metal after silver, and it’s the best natural conductor on earth. We need copper for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars (a typical electric car contains 175 pounds of copper). We need copper for the giant batteries that power us when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. We also need copper to massively expand and upgrade the countless power cables that underpin the energy grid of virtually every country. In the United States, we need to triple the capacity of our power grid to meet expected demand.
A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper needed over the next 25 years will exceed the amount humanity has consumed in all of history. “Nowhere has this amount of copper been produced in such a short time frame before,” the report states. The world may not be able to meet the challenge. Analysts predict a supply shortfall of millions of tons over the next few years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has proclaimed “No decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”
As the energy transition accelerated, copper’s value soared. Over the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has soared from roughly $6,400 to more than $9,000. As a result, electrical wiring, equipment, and even the raw metal as it comes out of the mines have become attractive targets for thieves. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of copper have been stolen around the world, and countless lives have been lost. No other metal, except perhaps gold, has caused so much death, injury, and destruction.
