This article reads like an advertorial and is sensationalist.
Firstly, the "one in four structural fires in South Africa is related to malfunctioning solar power systems," the actual source data comes exclusively from Fire Ops SA, a private emergency response service that operates primarily in specific high-income areas of Gauteng.
Fire Ops SA only responds to fires where they are contracted or dispatched, mostly in affluent suburban areas where solar adoption rates are disproportionately high. Taking a 25% rate from a private service's hyper-local dataset and presenting it as a blanket statistic for the entirety of South Africa is statistically invalid and misleading.
A fire "linked to" or "related to" a solar system does not automatically mean the solar system caused the fire. In many roof or structural fires, solar panels or wiring may catch fire as a secondary result of a blaze that started elsewhere in the house.
The article fails to provide the total number of fires Fire Ops SA responded to, or national fire statistics from public municipal fire services (like the Joburg or Cape Town Fire Services), which handle the vast majority of structural fires in informal settlements and non-solar households across the country.
