The development of off-grid power generation is in many ways a forced measure designed to mitigate energy supply risks amid power outages in the common grid. According to the national electricity operator ESKOM, outages were recorded on 80 out of 365 days in 2021, with the number of such days exceeding 200 in 2022 and rising to 320 in 2023.
A key reason for this is the failure of conventional generating capacities: for instance, the Kusile coal-fired thermal power plant (TPP) with a total capacity of 4.8 GW had three of its six power units malfunction due to the collapse of a cooling tower at the end of 2022. In turn, the power units of Koeberg, South Africa’s only nuclear power plant (NPP), which were put in operation in the mid-1980s, require lengthy repairs: the most recent repair at the second power unit took place from the end of 2022 to November 2023, shortly after which repairs began on the first reactor.
Nevertheless, conventional sources still play a key role in South Africa’s power industry. As of the end of 2022, the installed capacity of South Africa’s coal-, gas- and fuel oil-fired TPPs totaled 49.6 GW, with the same indicator at 1.9 GW for NPPs and at 10.5 GW for renewable energy sources connected to the common grid (including hydroelectric power plants). This means that off-grid generators used in the industrial and commercial sectors account for a mere of 4% of South Africa’s generation capacity. Therefore, their use can only help a few categories of consumers, but not the domestic power industry as a whole.
“Off-grid solar electricity generation can feed agriculture, irrigation, agro-processing, manufacturing and mining,” Mikael Alemu, recipient of the Honorary Diploma of the Global Energy Association, said earlier with regard to another African country, Ethiopia. “There are 24 industrial parks operating in Ethiopia, each of them consisting of hangars with the footage of 6,000 and 11,000 square metres. Give me the chance to install solar panels on the roofs of those hangars, and I will provide for energy generation in the volumes exceeding the needs of the industrial parks,” he stressed.