THE Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has released its annual statistics on power generation in South Africa for 2020.
The scope of the latest figures was expanded to include all utility-scale generating technologies including coal, nuclear, hydro, solar photovoltaics (PV), wind, Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), hydro, pumped storage and diesel fuelled open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs).
“In the unprecedented year that was 2020, system demand reduced by 11.8 Tera-Watthours (TWh) compared to -5.1% in 2019 relative to pre-lockdown forecasts,” the CSIR said in a statement.
It’s clear from the statistics that coal still dominates the South African energy mix but significantly, the contribution from variable renewable energy technologies (solar PV, wind and CSP) surpassed the contribution from nuclear energy for the first time.
“Based on a range of data sources but driven by a recently established Eskom data portal in the interests of power system data transparency, new insights are made possible on technology specific daily, weekly and monthly electricity production, actual load shedding experienced in 2020 as well as flexibility needs of the power system.”
Specific analysis into the COVID-19 induced lockdown and how this affected national level system demand and the Eskom fleet Energy Availability Factor (EAF) is also provided.
Read the full report here
