Department of Energy

The South African journey towards large-scale deployment of renewable energy (RE) technologies shows an eclectic mixture of Government policy interventions, which converged with market forces between 2008 and 2012 to deliver an unprecedented, world-class programme. This, the first State of Renewables Report in South Africa, traces the historic journey through the narratives of individual trailblazers and decision makers who influenced energy policy direction and, ultimately, REimplementation, in various ways. Building on these narratives, this report also highlights the main policy documents, legislative framework and institutions that are responsible for driving the RE agenda. It ends off by highlighting the integral role of research, development and human capital development, which are priorities for ensuring that South Africa keeps up with technological developments in this new field. A thread that runs through this report is that South Africa could not be where it is now without the financial and technical support of the international community and various Aid Agencies; there are too many to mention all of them in this report. South Africa is fortunate in that, over and above its rich coal resources, it is also well endowed with nondepletable RE sources, notably solar and wind. The country has an average of more than 2,500 hours of sunshine per year and average direct solar radiation levels range between 4.5 and 6.5kWh/m2 per day, placing it in the top-3 in the world. 

1st Draft of Post-2015 National Energy Efficiency Strategy. The Government of South Africa through the Department of Energy (DoE) released the first NationalEnergy Efficiency Strategy (NEES) in 2005. This strategy aimed to respond to the increasing demand for energy alongside a growing commitment to improving resource use and reducing South Africa‟s national environmental footprint. The NEES set an overall reduction target in energy intensity of 12% by 2015, and sectoral energy intensity improvements as follows: industry and mining (15%), power generation (10%), transport (9%), commercial and public building sector (15%), and residential (15%). The NEES derived its mandate from the WhitePaper on Energy Policy (1998) and it was subsequently revised in 2011. A NationalEnergy Efficiency Action Plan was developed in 2012 describing the implementationof the strategy.The Energy Efficiency Target Monitoring System was established in 2014 to monitorthe progress made towards meeting the original targets (based on a year 2000 baseline). The results of the analysis, which relied to a large extent on existing data, confirmed that significant progress has been made between 2000 and 2012 inimproving energy intensity, exceeding expectations for most sectors. The improvements in energy intensity reflect a combination of autonomous change,technological advancements, and deliberate interventions to improve energy efficiencies.

On 10 May 2009, President Jacob Zuma announced his new Cabinet and theappointment of, among others, the Minister of Energy. The Department of Energy (DoE) was consequently established. The DoE is mandated to ensure secure and sustainable provision of energy for socio-economic development. This is achieved by developing an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) for the entire energy sector and promoting investment in accordance with the IRP which focuses on energy. The DoE envisions the pursuance of the aforementioned mandate through the following strategic statements.AIM: Formulate energy policies, regulatory frameworks and legislation, and oversee their implementation to ensure energy security, promotion of environmentally-friendly energy carriers and access to affordable and reliable energy for all South Africans.VISION 2025: Improving our energy mix by having 30% clean energy by 2025. The vision of the DoE will be realised by the following factors as depicted in the figure below. Over the past 20 years, South Africa has not made significant investments in the energy sector. The capacity that was created in the 1980s was sufficient to carry usthrough to the early 2000s, when it became clear that the demand growth, fuelled by the commodity boom, outpaced power supply and that there was an urgent need to increase supply. External constraints in the global supply chains for power generation technology, particularly for nuclear plants, underscored the importance of improving energy security by way of a timely and sustainable build programme. Most countries faced the same problem of declining generation capacity around the same time as South Africa, which resulted in global supply chains becoming constrained as competition increased for machinery and services.