caused by

11:25 Sep 17, 2013 

Yes, due to dependency on hydroelectric power, I would imagine. The NE of Brazil is suffering outages currently after the worst drought in half a century.

08:21 Sep 17, 2013 

Wow! Explains a lot, then ;-)

08:14 Sep 17, 2013 

The country in question is Kenya ;-)

08:11 Sep 17, 2013 

I concur with all your comments.

To me, it is the 'outages' that are central here: the people suffering the outages probably don't know whether they are due to loadshedding or whatever, but from the users's perspective, outages are certainly going to be regarded as one of the "problems with power".

I'm intrigued to know why droughts cause power shortages? It seems to suggest this country is heavily dependent on hydroelectric power?

08:02 Sep 17, 2013 

I think you have every reason to be unsure about this, since both readings make sense: the insufficient supply is in fact the cause of the load shedding (or rolling blackouts: deliberate periodic shutdowns), but it is also the cause of the outages due to load shedding.

I think that "caused" is syntactically linked to "outages", rather than to "load shedding", because of the comma after "shedding", which implies that "outages due to load shedding" is a noun phrase to which "caused" refers. If the writer had intended "caused" to refer specifically to "load shedding", the comma should have been omitted, and the sentence should have read as follows:

"[...] widespread outages, due to load shedding caused by insufficient supply typically associated with droughts, have occurred [...]".

At least, that is how I see it in principle, though commas are not always used so carefully in practice.