Spatial Hourly Renewable Energy Supply Profiles for 10 Supply Areas of South Africa

Spatial hourly renewable energy supply profiles have been created for 10 supply areas of South Africa for onshore wind and solar PV. The 10 regional zones used are the "Eskom Supply Areas" provided in the Generation Capacity Connection Assessment 2025 (GCCA2025) and roughly match the administrative boundaries of the 9 provinces of South Africa with an additional Hydra Central cluster added to better model the electrical transmission network of the country. Renewables.ninja is used to obtain wind and PV production profiles both for the existing known locations of RE plants in South Africa (to be used for bias-correction) and also for prospective project locations obtained from the "Eskom 2024 South African Renewable Energy Grid Survey" (Eskom RE Survey 2024) indicating where project developers are most interested in constructing new plants in the future. Bias correction factors are calculated and applied for each of the regional profiles using the DoE REDIS production data of existing utility-scale RE plants in South Africa as the "ground truth" values to correct and improve the match of the modelled profiles. The correction factors allow for a better match of the satellite-based and modelled profiles from Renewables.ninja to the actual production performance of plants in the country, and these correction factors are then used to adjust the remaining modelled profiles in locations where no existing plants are operating. Onshore wind farms are modelled here with no off-shore plants currently assumed or modelled. The modelled PV profiles here represent utility-scale PV plants with single-axis tracking installed due to their highly favourable cost-performance trade-off in South African irradiation conditions, these profiles would not be appropriate for rooftop PV systems.