IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/unu/wpaper/wp-2026-69.html

Coal, weather shocks, and electricity reliability: Evidence from South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Imelda
  • Suchita Srinivasan

Abstract

Can weather shocks undermine energy security in coal-dependent economies? Using matched high-resolution rainfall data at South Africa's coal power plants and their contracted supplier mines—where coal accounts for about 80% of electricity generation—we estimate how upstream rainfall shocks propagate through the coal supply chain to affect plant performance and electricity reliability. We find that heavy rainfall at supplier mines reduces plant availability, primarily through unplanned outages. We also find evidence that upstream rainfall shocks increase the severity of load shedding.

Suggested Citation

  • Imelda & Suchita Srinivasan, 2026. "Coal, weather shocks, and electricity reliability: Evidence from South Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2026-69, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    • Handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2026-69
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2026-69-coal-weather-shocks-electricity-reliability.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2026-69. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Siméon Rapin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/widerfi.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.