The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has released its annual statistics on power generation in South Africa for the year 2021, painting a very dark picture of the state of Eskom and the energy supply in South Africa.
The annual statistics on power generation in South Africa for 2021, includes all utility-scale generation technologies – coal, nuclear, hydro, solar PV, wind, concentrated solar power (CSP), pumped storage, and diesel-fuelled open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs). Despite an increase in the contribution from renewable energy sources in 2021, last year overtook 2020 as the most intensive year of load shedding to date. “In 2021, the total system demand increased by 6.5 terawatt-hours, a 3% increase compared to the 2020 total system demand,” the CSIR said in a statement. “The 2021 total system demand is, however, still lower by 5.3TWh, a 2% decrease, when compared to 2019, pre-lockdown.”
This is largely due to the increase of unplanned outages (detailed by the unplanned capacity loss factor) experienced by Eskom.
Loadshedding in 2021 overtook 2020 as the most intensive year of loadshedding to date, with loadshedding concentrated in October and November, and dominated by Stage 2 loadshedding overall. In 2021, load shedding occurred for 1 169 hours (about 13% of the year). Other key findings of the report include:- In 2023, South Africa had 53.7GW of wholesale/public nominal capacity. Coal was 39.3GW; nuclear was 1.9GW; diesel (OCGT) was 3.4GW; hydro was 0.6GW and pumped storage was 2.7GW; wind was 3GW; solar PV was 2.2GW; and CSP was 0.5GW. Some 1.36GW of coal capacity, 528MW of wind farms and 180MW of utility-scale solar PV became operational in 2021.
- Coal contributed 81.4% of system demand in 2021, followed by 5.4% from nuclear, 11.9% from renewable energy (excluding hydro this was 6.7%) and 1.4W% from diesel.
