"The year 2022 is the first year that the majority of load shedding has not been Stage 2 as it was overtaken by Stage 4," the CSIR says in its annual statistics on power generation in South Africa. 

 A major shift in load-shedding occurred in 2022, when phase 4 began to account for the majority of load-shedding, with stage 6 occurrences surpassing those of 2019. 

 CSIR Principal Researcher, Warrick Pierce says that Eskom's energy availability factor (EAF) continued to decrease in 2022, with an average EAF of 59,4%, compared to the EAF of 61,7% for 2021 and 65% for 2020.

This is largely due to the increase in unplanned outages experienced by Eskom.

This means that in three months between July and September 2022, South Africa experienced more load shedding compared to the previous years.

Meanwhile, coal, according to CSIR, still dominates the South African energy mix, providing more than 80% of the total system load.

The statistics include all utility-scale generation technologies in the analysis. Technologies include coal, nuclear, hydro, solar photovoltaics (PV), onshore wind, concentrated solar power (CSP), pumped storage and diesel-fuelled open-cycle gas turbines.

"The contribution of renewable energy technologies such as wind, solar PV and CSP increased in 2022 to a total of 6.2 GW installed capacity and provided 6.5% of the total energy mix."

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