Ekurhuleni, the industrial hub of more than 3 million people to the east of Johannesburg, may have a head start in the race between South African cities to buy their own power to alleviate crippling outages imposed by the national utility. A program to procure as much as 700 MW of electricity that began in 2016 is coming to fruition, with one funder saying a project to build a 41 MW solar plant at a cost of about R1-billion will begin by the end of this year.
