Energies 2022, 15, 5962. https://doi.org/10.3390/en15165962 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies Review Battery Energy Storage for Photovoltaic Application in South Africa: A Review Bonginkosi A. Thango * and Pitshou N. Bokoro Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg 2028, South Africa * Correspondence: bonginkosit@uj.ac.za; Tel.: +27-65-564-7287 Abstract: Despite the significant slowdown of economic activity in South Africa by virtue of the COVID-19 outbreak, load shedding or scheduled power outages remained at a high level. The trend of rising load-shedding hours has persisted throughout most of the year 2022. Operational issues within the South African power utility inflamed the unpredictable nature of generation capacity, resulting in unscheduled outages at several generating units, mostly due to multiple breakdowns. To forestall substantial spikes in energy costs, an increasing number of enterprises and homeowners have started to gradually adopt renewable energy technologies to sustain their operational demand. Therefore, there is an increase in the exploration and investment of battery energy storage systems (BESS) to exploit South Africa’s high solar photovoltaic (PV) energy and help alleviate production losses related to load-shedding-induced downtime. As a result, the current work presents a com- prehensive and consequential review conducted on the BESS specifically for solar PV application and in the South African context. The research investigations carried out on BESS for PV application are crucially examined, drawing attention to their capacities, shortcomings, constraints, and pro- spects for advancement. This investigation probed several areas of interest where the BESS-PV scheme is adopted, viz., choice of battery technology, mitigating miscellaneous power quality prob- lems, optimal power system control, peak load shaving, South African BESS market and status of some Real BESS-PV projects. The techno-economic case scenario has been proposed in the current research and results yield that lithium-ion batteries are more viable than Lead–acid batteries. Keywords: South Africa; load shedding; battery energy storage systems (BESS); photovoltaic (PV) 1. Introduction The aging power plant infrastructure of the South African national electric utility, coupled with unscheduled blackouts, have hampered the power producer’s generating capacity for years, and these bottlenecks continue to be a major hurdle to future expan- sion. The utility issues, which include a congested electric grid, an outdated, unreliable, and inadequately maintained generating fleet, and a yearning for new generation capac- ity, have been accentuated by the increasing load-shedding days since 2018, as shown in Figure 1 [1]. Until significant supplemental wattage capacity is invested, their vulnerabil- ity to load shedding will be incessant. Increasing levies by national power utilities and municipalities, in addition to load shedding, have augmented the investment case for in- dustries in renewable energy generation and power efficiency initiatives [2,3]. To circum- vent hefty increases in electricity costs, an influx of major corporations is considering im- plementing alternative energy sources to support their daily operations. PV grid-tied sys- tems are playing a central role in this shift in the South African energy sector on account of their environmental merits and attenuated carbon emissions [4,5]. Since the enactment of the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), in March 2011, by the Department of Energy (DoE), there has been a gradual increase in the deployment of solar PV. The IRP 2019 steers the Citation: Thango, B.A.; Bokoro, P.N. Battery Energy Storage for Photovoltaic Application in South Africa: A Review. Energies 2022, 15, 5962. https://doi.org/10.3390/ en15165962 Academic Editors: Najib El Ouanjli, Saad Motahhir and Mustapha Errouha Received: 12 July 2022 Accepted: 14 August 2022 Published: 17 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Li- censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and con- ditions of the Creative Commons At- tribution (CC BY) license (https://cre- ativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).