Eskom has announced details of forthcoming Battery Energy Storage System deployments, as South Africa looks to solve the country's energy crisis. 

Early last week, South Africa’s President announced measures to solve South Africa's power crisis, including the establishment of a National Energy Crisis Committee to implement the plans.  During his speech, President Ramaphosa noted that a key priority was to accelerate the procurement of new capacity from renewables, gas, and battery storage, pledging to release a request for proposals for battery storage by September 2022.

Later thatweek, Eskom reported that it had made headway in a project aimed at keeping the grid stable during peak periods, awarding contracts to two suppliers to get its Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) moving.  The providers are South Korea’s Hyosung Heavy Industries and China’s Pinggao Group. Eskom intends to have the first 343MW of a 500MW national energy storage rollout online by December 2024.

The project will use large-scale utility batteries with a capacity of 1440 MWh per day, and 60 MW of solar PV spread across several Eskom sites in the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.  The systems will be built in two phases. Phase 1 (due June 2023) will see 199MW/833MWh of battery storage built, alongside 2MW of solar PV, while Phase 2 (due December 2024) will see 144MW/616MWh installed together with 58MW of solar PV.

It is well known that energy supply issues hamstring the South African economy.  These battery storage systems, if successfully implemented, will help manage peak load on the electricity network, as well as provide other applications like ancillary services.  However, much more needs to be done. 

South Africa has installed capacity to produce approximately 46,000 MW of electricity, and at peak times uses about 32,000 MW of electricity.   However, only 60% of this installed capacity is available at any given time due to some units going through planned maintenance and others having unplanned outages.  Many of South Africa’s power stations are old: the average age of Eskom’s power stations is 35 years and generally as power stations get older, their performance deteriorates.  In recent weeks, a combination of factors resulted in 18,000 MW of generation capacity being lost and forced Eskom to implement stage 6 load shedding.