Publication

South Africa and many other countries hope to aggressively expand wind and solar power (WSP) in coming decades. The challenge lies in translating these aspirations into concrete plans. This paper presents the results of a ten year study of expected hourly power generation for onshore wind, solar photovoltaic, and concentrating solar power technologies across South Africa. The author hopes that this example of using low-cost data and modeling techniques can be translated to other contexts, providing low-cost, early-stage information to guide long-term infrastructure planning as countries prepare to exploit WSP on a larger scale.