The dominance of solar photo-voltaic power continues to grow in South Africa’s journey towards energy security, with BloombergNEF’s Q1 global PV market outlook predicting that South Africa will be the 10th-largest PV market in the world in 2024.
Statistics generated by SAPVIA’s solar PV dashboard informed the BloombergNEF report, particularly in reference to the South African landscape. “Eskom and SAPVIA are also pioneering new methods of estimating rooftop solar capacity in a country, from how observed demand for power on the grid varies with the weather,” notes Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst at BloombergNEF, who authored the report. “These methods are likely to be used more widely in other countries as incentive programs for solar become less important and therefore more capacity is built without the need to be registered by a centralised body.
According to the information supplied to the report by SAPVIA, 90% to 95% of new residential solar installations and about 85% of commercial ones have battery electric storage for a few hours. The pipeline of solar projects registered with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa since the beginning of 2023 totals 4,3GW, according to SAPVIA’s own data portal, which is available on its website.