South Africa’s Power Crisis Will Persist Until 2025
South Africa’s power crisis will persist until 2025, with blackouts phasing out in 5 years. South Africa is facing a severe electricity crisis with increasing enforced power cuts, leaving people without electricity for up to 10 hours a day. The root cause is the frequent breakdowns in the country’s aging coal power plants, which make up 74% of its generating capacity.
While some propose a solution involving improving the performance and reliability of the existing coal plants, accomplishing this is easier said than done. It would require time-consuming and prohibitively expensive complete overhauls for many of these plants.
The current deficit demands an additional capacity of approximately 6,000MW, but achieving this will likely take up to five years to fully eliminate the shortfall. However, some improvements should be noticeable by the end of 2024.
Considering new coal, nuclear, or gas plants for future power supply typically takes around 10 years to construct, making their impact insignificant in the short to medium-term. Therefore, we will not discuss them further here.
Time lines for fixing existing power stations
The construction of South Africa’s largest power stations, Kusile and Medupi, faced numerous challenges, leading to significant delays and cost overruns. Even after years of operation, issues like explosions and collapses have further hindered their performance.As for the Koeberg nuclear power plant, delays in extending its operating license have occurred due to incomplete preparations, resulting in it currently operating at half-power. These problems indicate that the issues with fixing the existing power stations have severely affected the timelines and may extend into 2025.
South Africa’s power crisis will persist until 2025: Gas power ships
In 2021, in response to the worsening power crisis, the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy announced successful bids to provide 2,000MW of emergency power. The majority of this allocation, 1,200MW, went to Turkey’s Karpowership, a company with floating gas plants to be stationed in three of South Africa’s ports.
However, critics questioned this decision, raising concerns about the bidding terms favoring Karpowership unfairly. They also raised legal challenges regarding the approvals for environmental impact.
The main concern with the Karpowership agreement is that it establishes a 20-year arrangement for temporary emergency power, drawing strong opposition.
Due to this opposition and delays in other projects securing financial closure, the emergency program is now about a year behind schedule. While some projects may come online by the end of 2023, the additional capacity will only moderately reduce South Africa’s electricity shortfall.
Renewables
The Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme was designed to facilitate private developers in generating solar and wind energy, which they would then sell to Eskom, the power utility.
However, due to sunshine and wind’s intermittent nature, South African solar and wind farms produce only about 25% (solar) and 35% (wind) of their ideal capacity. To address a national shortfall of 6,000MW using these technologies alone, it would necessitate either 24,000MW of solar farms or 18,000MW of wind farms.
Currently, two rounds of establishing new plants under the renewables programme are in progress. The first round aims to bring 1,000MW of solar power and 1,600MW of wind power online by early 2025, followed by another 1,000MW of solar projects about a year later.
A 15,000MW mega-initiative of solar and wind power is proposed to significantly alleviate power scarcity. However, constructing such a large number of solar plants simultaneously would be challenging due to potential import bottlenecks and a shortage of skilled installers. While some of these plants might be ready by late 2025, the entire program is likely to take five years to complete.
South Africa’s power crisis will persist until 2025: Domestic and private solar installations
The most significant progress in increasing electricity production has come from small-scale solar power initiatives, including solar farms run by municipalities or private enterprises and solar panels installed on household roofs. Although this aspect is still relatively small, the president announced late last year that they were developing projects totaling 9,000MW.
However, the expansion of private solar installations faces similar challenges as the renewable energy programs, such as import bottlenecks and a shortage of skilled workers. Municipalities and smaller entities benefit from reduced power cuts, but these efforts only moderately alleviate the national electricity shortfall.
The timeframe for a possible recovery
Current actions or works in progress to address the South African power crisis won’t significantly impact the situation this year. The projections assume that there will be no major setbacks similar to last year’s Kusile accident.
Towards the end of the year, the generating capacity might increase by an additional 1,000-2,000MW. However, it will likely only substantially reduce the power shortage by the end of 2024, assuming expected completion of Kusile repairs and activation of renewable energy projects.
To eliminate power cuts completely. It may take five more years with the current planned expansion of solar and wind capacity.
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