Research in this field focuses on energy economics, regulations, energy policymaking and energy market design.

South African policymakers need support in understanding, benchmarking global best-practices for market design, and policymaking with a specific focus on energy markets with high penetration of fluctuating and distributed renewables. Parallel to this, concrete, tangible policy recommendations are required to guide South Africa’s energy trajectory along a sustainable path.

The CSIR’s main research challenge is to design an optimal regulatory framework for an energy system with a high penetration of (fluctuating) renewables on different levels: municipalities, local governments, national government, regionally and generally/globally.

This study analyses the technical, economic and policy aspects of solar energy development and deployment.

Energy economics

The CSIR develops and maintain a collection of models that may be used for calculation of levelised cost of energy from various technologies. The models will be made available to the public to promote understanding and engagement on the economic analysis of supply options.

Energy markets

Research focuses on a full overview of the local, regional and international markets, mainly in clean energy technologies.

Energy regulation

The regulatory team participates in local, regional, and global discussions around regulatory regimes for future energy systems. These discussion platforms enable exchange of ideas and establish a network of contacts to enhance possibilities for research collaboration and regulatory impact analysis on newly proposed regulations.

Energy trading

The trading group develops models that simulate the behaviour of major power exchanges globally. The aim is to raise awareness and understanding on how such power exchanges operate, how to identify bottlenecks that hinder power trading, and how to take these lessons and use them to optimise the design and operation.

Energy statistics

The CSIR provides capacity in a complementary manner to existing efforts to gather national energy data. Institutions that already collect data include: Stats SA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transport and municipalities. The CSIR engages with entities where poor data collection exists and then design measurement and data collection programmes to facilitate availability of up-to-date energy data.