SA’s electricity capacity cliff and the political economy of self-constraint

SOUTH Africa’ electricity crisis has, over time, been rendered intelligible through a narrow explanatory frame.

- GILLIAN SCHUTTE

Institutional decay, corruption, administrative failure, and political incompetence have become the dominant interpretive categories through which energy shortfalls are understood. These explanations circulate across policy reports, donor-funded research, NGO commentary, and mainstream media analysis. While not incorrect, they have assumed an explanatory monopoly that obscures deeper structural dynamics.

Matshela Koko’s paper, South Africa's 2030 Electricity Capacity Cliff: Institutional Frictions, Sociotechnical Inertia, and the Political Economy of Accelerated Coal Phase-Out, intervenes decisively in this discourse. Rather than centring questions of managerial virtue or institutional ethics, the paper situates South Africas looming electricity shortfall within the temporal mechanics of capacity withdrawal and replacement. The crisis, in this formulation, is produced by speed, sequencing, and structural constraint rather than by administrative failure alone.

Compressed Coal Retirement and System Exposure

By March 2030, South Africa is scheduled to retire approximately 9.5 gigawatts of coal-fired baseload capacity within a twenty-four-month period. This represents roughly 13.6% of peak electricity demand. The critical issue lies not only in the scale of the retirement but in its temporal concentration. These retirements occur in an electricity system already operating under persistent supply deficits, declining plant availability, and rising demand pressures.

Koko describes this condition as an electricity capacity cliff. The term captures the abruptness of capacity withdrawal and the absence of sufficient time for system reconfiguration. Baseload exits the system faster than physical infrastructure, institutional processes, and grid expansion can respond,

Velocity and the Cliff Intensity Index