Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 6480: Mitigating Load Shedding in South Africa Through Optimized Hybrid Solar–Battery Deployment: A Techno-Economic Assessment

Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 6480: Mitigating Load Shedding in South Africa Through Optimized Hybrid Solar–Battery Deployment: A Techno-Economic Assessment

Energies doi: 10.3390/en18246480

Authors:
Ginevra Vittoria
Rui Castro

South Africa’s persistent electricity shortages and recurrent load shedding remain among the most pressing challenges to national economic growth and social stability. This paper presents a techno-economic framework to assess how optimized deployment of photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) can mitigate these disruptions under realistic grid and regulatory constraints. Despite recent operational improvements at Eskom—including a 10-month period without load shedding in 2024—energy insecurity persists due to aging coal assets, limited transmission capacity, and slow renewable integration. Using hourly demand and solar-resource data for 2023, combined with Eskom’s load-reduction records, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) model identifies cost-optimal hybrid system configurations that minimize the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) while maximizing coverage of unserved energy. Three deployment scenarios are analyzed: (i) constrained regional grid capacity, (ii) flexible redistribution of capacity across six provinces, and (iii) unconstrained national deployment. Results indicate that constrained deployment covers about 86% of curtailed load at 1.88 USD kWh−1, whereas flexible and unconstrained scenarios achieve over 99% coverage at ≈0.58 USD kWh−1. The findings demonstrate that targeted PV–BESS expansion, coupled with selective grid reinforcement, can effectively eliminate load shedding and accelerate South Africa’s transition toward a resilient, low-carbon electricity system.