Arnot Power Station in Mpumalanga. As South Africa accelerates its energy transition, a gap is opening between financial planning and physical reality. Gillian Schutte compares DBSA’s modelling with Matshela Koko’s warning about near-term system strain, and asks who carries the risk when timelines collide with infrastructure.
South Africa is under sustained pressure to abandon coal. Coal is repeatedly described as dirty, outdated and incompatible with a modern economy, and this framing now dominates official energy transition planning. At the same time, South Africa continues to export millions of tonnes of coal each year to countries that burn it for electricity and industry, including European states that publicly position themselves as climate leaders.
This contradiction sits beneath the growing tension between the Development Bank of Southern Africa’s energy modelling and the analysis advanced by Matshela Koko, former Interim Group Chief Executive of Eskom, on South Africa’s approaching electricity capacity cliff. DBSA’s report, South Africa’s Energy Sector Investment Requirements to Achieve Energy Security and Net Zero by 2050, sets out a long-term pathway for the electricity system. It concludes that system adequacy can be maintained through to 2030 and that zero unserved energy is achievable thereafter, provided coal performance remains within forecast ranges and planned investments materialise.
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Institutional weaknesses, policy fragmentation and financing gaps are acknowledged, yet treated as challenges that can be addressed through reform, coordination and capital mobilisation. Koko’s paper approaches the problem from a different temporal and diagnostic position. Rather than modelling optimal future outcomes, it asks whether South Africa can replace ageing coal capacity fast enough to avoid power shortages before 2030, given the actual condition of the fleet, the state of the grid and the time required to build new infrastructure.
His answer is negative. Using the Cliff Intensity Index, Koko shows that coal capacity exits the system faster than replacement capacity can be integrated, even under highly optimistic governance assumptions. Both analyses rely on the same underlying facts.
Both acknowledge scheduled coal retirements, rising demand, the expiry of Cahora Bassa imports and uncertainty around Minimum Emission Standards compliance. The Cahora Bassa power import agreement currently supplies more than a gigawatt of firm, dispatchable electricity into South Africa’s grid, and its expiry in March 2030 coincides almost exactly with the largest cluster of domestic coal station retirements. The overlap is cumulative rather than incidental.
A major external baseload source exits the system at the same moment ageing coal capacity is withdrawn, tightening supply margins within an already compressed window. Yet the two analyses reach different conclusions about near-term adequacy.
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