Toolkit 1: Integrated solutions
South Africa’s energy system faces a challenging balancing act between maintaining energy security, ensuring energy affordability, achieving economic growth, and meeting our 2050 net-zero commitments. To navigate the complexities of this transition, we need more than incremental fixes. This calls for the implementation of an integrated energy system – a robust framework that aligns our immediate priorities with our long-term vision of a decarbonised, inclusive, and resilient energy future.
If you have listened to, or partaken in, conversations about energy in South Africa, you may have noticed that those conversations revolve mostly around the supply of electricity. People generally talk about what technology is being used to generate power, what mix of generation technologies is required, and by when. But the energy sector is much broader than just supply!
South Africa’s energy sector requires an integrated energy system that takes into consideration:
- Supply: The selection of energy generation technologies, including but not limited to wind, solar, coal, gas, nuclear, and battery storage.
- Demand: The evolving needs and behaviors of consumers, alongside digital technologies and efficiency improvements.
- Infrastructure: The comprehensive management and maintenance of power infrastructure, such as transmission, distribution, and fuel supply.
- Market: The dynamics of competition, trading, finance, regulations, and pricing.
Each element has interdependencies meaning if we change one thing in the system, it will have a knock-on effect on another/others and eventually impact South Africans like you.
An integrated system ensures that all parts of the energy sector work together, driving effective solutions that are both sustainable and efficient. Only by considering the whole system can we overcome the challenges in South Africa’s energy sector and create a future where energy is reliable, affordable, and accessible for all.
What is the energy challenge in South Africa?
In South Africa, we need:
- Increased power supply from cleaner sources to ensure we don’t return to loadshedding, and to meet our climate commitments
- More demand management and improvement of energy efficiency to reduce energy waste
- Increased infrastructure, to get power to people, places and businesses
- Committed market reform, so that we can attract more investment.
These four elements – supply, infrastructure, market reform and demand management — are interdependent, which is why we need an integrated approach when we look at how to Switch on, Mzansi
More power
More infrastructure
More market reform
Less waste
How big is the challenge?
By 2035, we will have to:
- Produce at least five times more power than we currently do, requiring more than R1.3 trillion of investment.
- Reduce energy waste by improving efficiency through innovations like smart grid technologies.
- Triple transmission infrastructure, requiring more than R400-billion of investment. Strengthen our distribution and municipal infrastructure, requiring more than R300-billion of investment
- Reform the way power is ‘bought’ and ‘sold’ so that the energy market promotes competition, an efficient system and is attractive to potential investors.
Do you see why we need integrated solutions? We can’t increase the supply of power without market reform and the investment that will follow that.
Government can’t afford to fund all these investments, which means major changes in legislation and reforms are required to enable private investor confidence. This will reduce our level of country debt and transfer the investment risk to energy investors who compete to provide the best terms and conditions for South Africa.
How do we ensure integrated solutions?
We need to make sure that whenever we are discussing energy in South Africa the conversation includes all elements of the integrated energy system. That way we can direct the national energy conversation to focus on effective delivery and implementation in an integrated way.
That means we need to discuss and debate:
- Delivery pathways, and how they can be integrated
- Trade-offs that may need to be made around, and the linkages between issues such as cutting emissions and the impact on jobs
- Pragmatic and practical action that is based on the interdependencies of power supply, demand management, market reform and investment
Integrated solutions are the only way to successfully
#EnergiseMzansi
