SATIM’s structure broadly mirrors South Africa’s energy balance by representing:

  • Primary energy supply, including domestic extraction and imports of coal, oil, gas, and renewables;
  • Conversion processes, such as electricity generation technologies, liquid fuel refining and synthetic fuels, and hydrogen production
  • Sectoral energy demand, disaggregated into residential, commercial, industrial, transport, and agriculture sectors, each with specific end-use technologies.

 

Energy Balance

South Africa Energy Balance, 2017 

 

However, SATIM goes beyond a standard energy balance by incorporating greater technological detail and temporal resolution to enable comprehensive energy system optimisation.

Each demand sector is further disaggregated into subsectors (e.g. iron and steel, passenger transport, etc.) and eventually down to technology level (e.g. blast furnaces, private petrol sedans, etc.). Technologies are characterised with data on fuel use, cost, efficiency, emissions and other relevant parameters.

When running a scenario in SATIM ‘solves’ the least cost technology mix to meet the projected demand for energy services (based on macroeconomic drivers (GDP, population) over the modelling horizon, taking into account any particular constraints such as emissions limits, technology costs and availability, fuel prices, and other user-defined constraints. SATIM’s base year is currently 2017 (i.e., initial energy demand and supply data for South Africa are based on the 2017 energy balance).

SATIM Papers