To meet suppressed demand, keep pace with projected economic growth, and provide additional capacity to support the rollout of electrification, 7,000 megawatts of new generation capacity must be built each year—seven times the annual average of the last 10 years. In addition, more than 44,000 megawatts of existing generation capacity requires refurbishment. The bulk of the new generating capacity will be needed to meet nonresidential demands.
Raising electrification rates by a modest one percentage point each year will require extending domestic distribution networks to reach an additional five million households per year over the next decade. In addition, 22,000 megawatts of cross-border transmission capacity are needed to permit the regional pooling of energy resources.
The total expansion cost of $41 billion per year covers new investment and rehabilitation, as well as operations and maintenance. Almost half of these spending requirements are associated with the Southern African Power Pool.
For more details on how these estimates were made, and to make customized estimates of your own, explore the power sector spending needs model.
Power spending needs ($ billion a year over a decade)