Energy Transition During Energy Crisis: Cape Town's Experience (2024-2025)

The project team sought to understand the justice implications of South Africa’s ongoing energy crisis, focusing on Cape Town as a case study. Since 2007, rolling blackouts, known as load shedding, have disrupted daily life and widened social inequalities. While wealthier residents and firms have increasingly turned to rooftop solar systems to cope with the outages, low-income communities face heavier burdens and fewer options. Against this backdrop, the team examined how distributed solar adoption and new policy interventions could influence energy use, equity, and resilience in the city.

To analyze these dynamics, the team divided into three subteams. One used machine learning to detect solar home systems across Cape Town from aerial imagery, providing the first large-scale picture of where and how widely rooftop solar has been adopted. A second subteam applied econometric techniques to study how electricity consumption patterns differ between households with and without solar systems, including whether residents adjust their usage before scheduled blackouts. A third subteam incorporated these findings into an energy systems model, testing how different policy scenarios might affect both energy supply and consumer behavior. The project produced group reports for each subteam, a poster for the Bass Connections showcase and an academic paper now in preparation for publication. 

Timing

Summer 2024 – Spring 2025

Team Outputs

Energy Transition During Energy Crisis: Cape Town’s Experience (Poster presentation at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, April 16, 2025)

Subteam reports

Journal article in progress

See related Data+ summer project, Energy Transition During Energy Crisis: Cape Town's Experience (2024).

Image: Cape Town Aerial, by Mikael Colville-Andersen, licensed under CC BY 2.0