A system dynamics approach to simulating the electricity demand for the South African forestry & logging sector

The growth in South Africa's population and economy increases the need to ensure that future unserved electricity is avoided by ensuring adequate electricity supply. The understanding of the various elements that impact the different economic sectors' electricity consumption is key in effective electricity supply planning. A system dynamics approach was used to develop a simulation of the South African forestry & logging sector, projecting the electricity demand from 1992 to 2040. This paper focuses on the results that were obtained following the development of the system dynamics simulator which was used to facilitate dynamic sensitivity analysis to better understand this complex system of many interacting variables. The electricity consumption is driven by material flows through the different forestry and production mill processes that require electricity. In turn, the volume of material flow per products stream is driven by a change in GDP. The simulator allows scenario analysis on changes in electricity consumption as a function of variations in some of the key drivers of the sector e.g. trends in the implementation of energy efficient technologies and selfor co-generation options. The methodology used in developing the simulator and results obtained from running scenarios will be discussed in this paper.