regional SPVs including OMVS (Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du fleuve Sénégal) purchased by Mali, Mauritania and Senegal; Ruzizi purchased by Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda; MOTRACO (Mozambique Transmission Company) purchased by South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique; CEB (Communauté Electrique du Bénin) purchased by Benin and Togo; and a small portion through the day-ahead market facilitated by the Southern African Power Pool.

# 3.4 Availability factors and reserve margins

Inadequate electricity is mostly the result of inadequate investment in new power generation capacity, but can also be the result of deteriorating performance of existing generation plants. One of the casualties of insufficient revenue is maintenance expenditure. Utility managers often have to choose between paying salaries, buying fuel, or purchasing spares (forcing them to cannibalize parts from functional equipment). The weighted average available capacity—which is lower than the nominal capacity due to age as well as mechanical and other constraints—for a subset of 20 countries with available data is 87 percent of installed capacity, falling to 73 percent if South Africa is excluded.

Reserve margins—available capacity over and above the capacity needed to meet normal peak demand—are small in many countries. Data are available for a subset of 14 countries, with a weighted average reserve margin of 18 percent, which is within the ideal reserve margin of 15–20 percent. However, utility reported estimates for peak demand are likely underestimated, because it is difficult to estimate unserved demand with customers not yet connected to the grid. In addition, there is a positive selection bias built into this estimate, as those utilities reporting available capacity and peak demand tend to be those better managed with the systems in place to track these data. Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Senegal, and South Africa are the only countries with a reserve margin greater than 15 percent. Namibia and Zimbabwe have supply shortages in excess of 20 percent of peak demand.

# 3.5 Consumption

Consumption data are available for 46 countries. Average annual consumption in SSA, as measured by the amount billed by the utilities in the respective reference years and totaled across the countries studied, was 375 kWh per capita, falling to 153 kWh per capita if South Africa is excluded (see annex 6 for more detail). Although this measure does not capture self-generation or unbilled electricity consumption—which could be considerable—this is low by any international standards, even when compared to other emerging markets. For example, India had average consumption of 780 kWh per capita in 2011 (Pargal and Banerjee 2014) and Mexico averaged 1,952 kWh per capita in 2012 (IEA 2015). Within SSA, there is significantly higher consumption per capita in Southern Africa—pulled up by South Africa—than elsewhere. Annual consumption in South Africa was 4,000 kWh per person. Even after excluding South Africa, annual consumption in the rest of Southern Africa was 428 kWh per person, compared to only 111 kWh per person in Eastern Africa, the lowest consuming region in SSA. Annual consumption per connected customer is significantly higher, at 3,875 kWh per capita excluding South Africa, with the difference reflecting the low levels of access in SSA.

Fourteen countries have systems larger than 1 GW. Together, these larger systems accounted for more than 90 percent of electricity consumption in SSA, whereas 20 countries with systems smaller than 150 MW accounted for just over 1 percent (Figure 3).

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