How much will renewable energy (RE) help ease rolling power cuts? This was the question Premier Alan Winde’s 25th Energy Digicon focused on this week.
Academic and author, Professor Mark Swilling, was the Premier’s special guest. Prof. Swilling said, “Loadshedding will only really come to an end when we have sufficient RE coming into the grid. There is a lot of RE in the pipeline. When you add it all together, we could look forward to ending loadshedding in 2024, at the earliest, maybe 2025.”
South Africa’s transition towards energy resilience is being largely driven by the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP) and solar rooftop installations. Private households and businesses are leading the way in generating solar power. Prof. Swilling added, “That is 4.4 GW of renewables through roof top solar. If you work out what households and businesses have had to invest in order to achieve that rather remarkably high figure, it is about R65 billion.”
2022 was a decisive turning point in the energy crisis. While loadshedding broke records, there was also a marked increase in investment in alternative energy sources, primarily from the private sector and households.
Prof. Swilling pointed out that up to about 30 GW of renewables are in the pipeline in various ways. If just 10 GW came online in the next 18 months, we could see the ending of most of the loadshedding we are seeing. However, this is largely dependent on the situation at Eskom not worsening in the coming two years.
The only certainty when it comes to the Eskom fleet is uncertainty. No Eskom official can wake up in the morning and predict with certainty what is going to happen.
On the role Eskom will play going forward, the professor said that the future of Eskom is in transmission, which involves the parastatal being “unbundled” into separate entities. “Once we have the transmission company fully established then transmission assets can be transferred to it, which would then enable that company to raise the capital required to invest in our transmission grid. If we do not massively invest in our transmission grid over the next 5 to 10 years, no matter how much money we mobilise for investment in new generation, we will not be able to bring it online.”
Eskom would at the same time also have to invest heavily in substation development in areas of the country where there is existing power line infrastructure. “The low-hanging fruit would be to invest in substations, this could release up to 17 GW of capacity,” said Prof Swilling.
Premier Winde said, “It is very clear we have to keep enabling the private sector and households to unleash their full potential in investing in RE with the aim of reducing and eventually ending power cuts.”
Prof. Swilling continued that in the long term, the investment requirements into RE up to 2050 would amount to around R4 trillion if the country is to achieve energy security and net zero carbon emissions.
In his weekly energy status update, Mr Alwie Lester, Special Advisor to the Premier on Energy, pointed out that the energy availability factor (EAF) for the current week was at 58%, up from 54% the previous week. This is due to generating units being returned to service and that electricity demand has eased somewhat as the weather warms up. However, he added planned maintenance will increase during the summer months in an effort to ensure that Eskom is in a better position next winter.
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