Abstract
South Africa’s coal consumption accounts for 69.6% of the total energy consumption of South Africa, and this represents more than 88% of African coal consumption, taking the first place in Africa. Thus, predicting the coal demand is necessary, in order to ensure the supply and demand balance of energy, reduce carbon emissions and promote a sustainable development of economy and society. In this study, the linear (Metabolic Grey Model), nonlinear (Non-linear Grey Model), and combined (Metabolic Grey Model-Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average Model) models have been applied to forecast South Africa’s coal consumption for the period of 2017–2030, based on the coal consumption in 2000–2016. The mean absolute percentage errors of the three models are respectively 4.9%, 3.8%, and 3.4%. The forecasting results indicate that the future coal consumption of South Africa appears a downward trend in 2017–2030, dropping by 1.9% per year. Analysis results can provide the data support for the formulation of carbon emission and energy policy.
Highlights
In recent years, due to the strong relationship between coal consumption and carbon emission, people have paid more attention to coal consumption
The decline trend of coal consumption is consistent with the direction of policy adjustment in South African government
South Africa is a country that the energy sources are diversified, such as solar energy and wind energy [12,47,48]; its coal consumption represents 88.7% of the total consumption of the whole African continent
Summary
Due to the strong relationship between coal consumption and carbon emission, people have paid more attention to coal consumption. Peters et al suggested that the leading cause for current environment problems is the large use of coal by developed countries as well as a few developing countries such as China, as their pursuit of economic growth [6,7]. They attribute the responsibility of reducing carbon emission to developed countries and some developing countries [7,8,9]. In the era of globalization, it is a shared responsibility for all countries to reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment
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