Home > News > Company News > South Africa Imported $1.1 Billion (4.4GWh) Worth Of Lithium-ion Batteries in First Six Months
30,Dec. 2024

Some recent analysis by Geller Montmarson-Claire, senior economist at Trade, Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) in Johannesburg, shows that in the first six months of 2023, South Africa imported $650 million (R12 billion) worth solar panels. Geller added that this is equivalent to 2.2GW of solar panels.


South Africa Imported $1.1 Billion (4.4GWh) Worth Of Lithium-ion Batteries in First Six Months


Now, new data from Geller shows that during the same period, South Africa imported $1.1 billion worth of lithium-ion batteries. Worth $1.1 billion in the first 6 months of 2023 alone! If we use the current bulk order price estimate of $250/KWh for stationary energy storage systems, this means that South Africa imported approximately 4.4GWh of lithium-ion batteries in the first six months of this year. Geller added that this is a huge jump from the $700 million worth of batteries imported in all of 2022 and five times the $200 million worth of imports in 2021.

 

Many of South Africa's coal-fired power plants are now quite old. As such, plant failures are common and Eskom, the country's national power utility, also has a sizeable portion of its fleet planned for maintenance and tune-ups to improve some of the performance of these aging plants. This resulted in South Africa experiencing its worst ever period of electricity rationing, known as load shedding. Eskom's load shedding program is carried out in "phases", with Eskom removing a certain amount of load from the grid to stabilize the grid, rather than shedding load all at once. Load shedding will be implemented in stages from Phase 1 to Phase 8, depending on the severity of the crisis, with Phase 1 removing 1,000MW of load from the grid, while in Phase 8, Eskom will remove 8,000MW of load from the grid. Depending on the severity of the crisis, load shedding is implemented on a 2- or 4-hour rotating basis. However, Level 8 means most consumers will experience approximately 12 hours of outage. This year alone, South Africa has experienced more load shedding than in the past five years combined. Therefore, South Africa needs to add new generation capacity as soon as possible.



It’s great to see the growth of distributed and utility-scale solar PV in South Africa, which is rapidly adding some significant capacity to the country’s energy mix. However, due to frequent blackouts, battery storage installations for residential and commercial industrial applications are booming as South Africans urgently need to support their homes and businesses during power outages. The deployment of batteries adds critical grid flexibility.



As a result, South Africa spent $650 million importing solar cells in the first six months of this year, and then spent another $1.1 billion importing lithium-ion batteries. US$1.75 billion was spent in just 6 months! This has led to some big discussions about how to develop the localization of this ecosystem. There are several companies in South Africa that import solar cells and then assemble solar panels. The same goes for stationary battery storage. There are several companies that import lithium-ion batteries and assemble battery packs for local and export markets.