A Stark Reality for the Energy Transition

How Energy System Instability Contributed to ANC’s Downfall

The ANC's historic defeat is, in part, due to the socio-economic impact of having a dangerously unstable energy system. The rest of the world should take note.

Most western visitors to South Africa marvel at the wildlife, the landscapes and the culture, while simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief as they board their flight home and leave behind the power cuts that disrupt the country.

But what is the source of the problem with South Africa’s electricity supply that has plagued the country for over 30 years and contributed to the ANC’s historic election defeat? And are visitors really leaving those problems behind when they fly home?

Supply and demand for electricity must match in real time in order to have a stable, functioning energy system without blackouts. This means that new generation must be built ahead of new demand, and that this generation must be available at the moment that power is needed. South Africa has failed to deliver this, and the energy transition means that other countries are also now at risk of failing to deliver the stable and secure power that their economies require to prosper.

Investments are needed far in advance of expected energy demand

At the end of apartheid, South Africa experienced a tremendous increase in electricity demand as townships, previously not connected to the electricity system, were connected for the first time. South Africa did not expand generation quickly enough to meet this demand, which has led to an energy system which is completely unstable. Generation (supply) falls short of load (demand), and ESKOM, the national utility, has been forced to implement a continuous schedule of “load-shedding” - where entire sections of the network are shut-down to avoid complete system failure.

When South Africa transitioned to democratic rule, most townships lacked access to electricity. The percentage of South Africans with access to electricity rapidly rose, from 57.6% in 1996 to 90% in 2020. The change was even more stark in rural areas, where electricity access rose from 23.8% in 1996 to 95.5% in 2020.  This massive increase in electrical demand required massive investments in electricity production and delivery and in network management and control. When those investments failed to materialise, the legacy system was rapidly overwhelmed.

The problems South Africa faces daily are becoming more and more pertinent for the rest of the world as it electrifies everything from transport to heat: We are rapidly increasing demand for electricity. The energy transition means that developed countries are on the cusp of a similar explosion in electricity demand, which risks overwhelming legacy systems as in South Africa.

There are no silver bullets, and big nuclear projects can lead to big disappointment

Loadshedding would be much less severe if Koeberg, Africa’s only nuclear power station, were fully operational. However, one of Koeberg’s two units has been closed for a refit and life extension project that, like many nuclear power projects globally, is behind schedule. The other unit also needs to be refitted, creating the risk that commercial operation at Koeberg will cease entirely.[1] While nuclear energy promises plentiful, affordable and decarbonised energy—and I’ve previously publicly supported nuclear power as part of the solution to climate change for this reason[2]—the reality of these projects can be very different.

Energy availability is key to social equity, society cohesion and prosperity

The damage lack of reliable power can cause to society is catastrophic. Today, especially in Europe, there are various voices arguing that we should accept that addressing climate change requires using less energy, and so-called “de-growth”. The negative impact of such an approach, as exemplified by the South African situation, falls squarely on those most economically vulnerable.

South Africa’s current energy problems are a pocket of the future – a situation where the trends that could drive the future are playing out fastest. It shows us a possible future for the wider world if energy, particularly electricity, is no longer reliable and affordable.

The standard “load-shedding” schedule in South Africa defines the priority each area receives for each period of the day, and the greater the shortfall, the more areas are switched off. People follow the load imbalance and priority schedule closely in a mobile phone app, which alerts them when power is scheduled to be switched off, and plan their lives around it: Will there be enough hours of power to complete a cycle of the washing machine? When will the restaurant we want to visit be open? Which way should we drive at night to ensure the traffic lights are working? Depending on the level of loadshedding, power might be off for anything from a couple of hours to nine hours or more.

With good forecasting, people try to live their lives around scheduled loadshedding, but unexpected system imbalances can lead to far more disruptive, unplanned loadshedding, with as little as five minutes notice. People have tried to insulate themselves from the impact of loadshedding in myriad ways. Those who can afford to do so have upgraded their homes with solar panels, battery systems or diesel generators and choose to spend time in public places that have their own generators, like modern shopping centres, office buildings, restaurants and gyms. Fuel of every sort is at a premium, from diesel, which is burned 24/7 in power plants and used in back-up generators by homes and businesses, to BBQ wood, which is sometimes in short supply as an alternative to electric cooking during loadshedding.

The Electricity Supply Commission’s (ESKOM’s) attempts at demand management through loadshedding exacerbate inequality. Not only can most of society not afford alternatives to grid power, which indeed only arrived in many townships in recent decades, but the most vulnerable are also disproportionately impacted by the increased cost of power. This in turns drives problems like power theft and non-payment, complicating the investments that are required to improve the availability of power.

Furthermore, unreliable power has driven many smaller businesses, especially light industry and manufacturing, to reduce employee numbers and hours or to close entirely, lowering wages and increasing unemployment. At a macroeconomic level, the South African Reserve Bank estimates that loadshedding reduced already disappointing GDP growth by 1.2-3 percentage points in 2022 and is a major contributor to reducing potential growth from a steady state level of 2.5% to 0% in 2023.[3]

Decentralisation needs to be designed in as part of the solution

Both inequality and system instability are worsened by the often well-intentioned actions of more affluent households to preserve their own energy supply. Behind-the-meter solar capacity more than doubled in the year to June 2023, reaching 4.4 GW. To complement this solar, South Africa imported five times more batteries in the first quarter of 2023 than in all of 2022.[4] As these new distributed resources come on stream, the shape of the system changes and its behaviour becomes more complex. This makes it harder for ESKOM to forecast demand with its current tools, which were built for a system based on 17 large, dispatchable coal-fired power stations, clustered in the north-east of the country.

These home energy systems also create added challenges for the distribution network. When power is available, homes with batteries increase their current draw to charge these batteries. Not only does this enable households with batteries to retime their consumption of power from the grid while others go without power, but they also create problems with the stability of the local grid. Solar panels provide power and charge batteries, but they also create phase balancing problems and are typically connected with low quality inverters that induce noise and harmonics, reducing the carrying capacity of the already strained distribution network. While these distributed resources could theoretically contribute to system stability, there is no platform to coordinate their behaviour to do so.

South Africa is not unique in adopting distributed energy resources, and the energy system everywhere is becoming more complex. This is especially true at the edge, where we find EV chargers, solar panels, home batteries and various other new technologies. South Africa shows that these technologies can serve the individual home, but also contribute to grid instability. Grid modernisation must take account of the rise of decentralised resources, and ESKOM does not have the budget to improve monitoring and control at grid level to understand and manage the changing shape of electricity demand, let alone leverage them to support system stability. Fully utilising these decentralised energy resources requires both local grid technology to accommodate these resources and platforms to enable these resources to coordinate on a peer-to-peer basis to provide balancing services to the system as a whole.

Renewable energy cannot solve the problem without new technology

Renewable energy is making a contribution, with 2.2GW of utility scale solar and 3.4GW of wind complementing the 4.4GW of rooftop solar discussed above.[5] Indeed, encouraging the development of renewable energy was a notable success for President Ramaphosa, but it was insufficient to keep the lights on and the ANC in power.[6] The failure to deliver reliable energy has led South Africa to fall back on the dirtiest fuels. Diesel generators, which were ubiquitous in homes and businesses long before the boom in solar and batteries, contribute to local air pollution. Cooking with wood also exacerbates local air pollution. At grid scale, diesel-burning power stations, which were originally designed to only operate for short periods to meet peak demand, are now running continually. This further amplifies the negative equity consequences of an unstable power system.

South Africa gives us a glimpse of one possible energy future: a world in which the energy trilemma is not resolved, and reliable energy is no longer something that society can take for granted. The South African example shows clearly that while some households can insulate themselves from the immediate consequences of blackouts, society as a whole cannot prosper.

To solve these problems, policy, infrastructure and technology are all needed: South Africa has plentiful sun, favourable wind conditions and, indeed, ample coal reserves. These are complemented by the hydropower resources in other countries of the South African Power Pool. But these resources, whether renewable or fossil fuel, cannot deliver a reliable energy system without the right policy framework, delivery infrastructure and enabling technology. Energy security is often framed primarily as a resource challenge, but South Africa shows that resources are not enough. All aspects of the energy ecosystem must align to deliver reliable and secure energy.

[1] https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-10-20-koeberg-nuclear-power-station-rising-risk-of-total-shutdown/

[2] https://www.economist.com/unknown/2006/09/25/nuclear-power

[3] https://www.resbank.co.za/content/dam/sarb/publications/occasional-bulletin-of-economic-notes/2023/oben-2301-reflections-on-load-shedding-and-potential-gdp-june-2023.pdf

[4] https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/weekly-data-south-africas-unprecedented-rooftop-solar-boom/

[5] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/03/south-africa-now-has-over-10-gw-of-wind-solar-generation-capacity/

[6] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/01/22/south-africa-the-worlds-coal-junkie-tries-to-quit