Civil society anticorruption lobby organisation the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) welcomes State-owned power utility Eskom’s decision to ease red tape around the registration of residential solar and battery energy systems. The organisation says this is a long-overdue step toward less onerous conditions for the registration process required by Eskom.
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South Africa’s R440-billion transmission grid expansion programme has attracted interest from international developers, including a company owned by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and Chinese firms. The continent’s most industrialised nation started up the Independent Transmission Projects program in December to bring in private partners to help install 14 000 km new power lines. The government aims to add 34 gigawatts of generating capacity from wind and 25 gigawatts from solar over the next 14 years, and will require more connections to an already constrained system.
The bottlenecks in South Africa’s national transmission grid, referred to as gridlock, are a major concern for the country’s wind power sector. This was highlighted during a panel discussion on the first day (Wednesday) of the Windaba 2025 conference, being held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Gridlock is hampering the connection of new renewable-energy sources to the grid. “The grid is a massively important issue,” affirmed South African renewable-energy company Anthem CEO James Cumming. He expects to see another period in which renewable-energy generators will have to wait for the grid to get the capacity to accommodate them, before they will be able to connect with it. He urges renewable energy and the other relevant entities to work together to create combined grid applications that have sufficient scale to make a grid connection credible.
Seriti Green CEO Peter Venn says the ease with which individuals with deep coal industry experience have transitioned into renewable energy has been a remarkable aspect of the company’s recent progress in implementing its first large-scale wind projects in the coal region of Mpumalanga. Seriti Green is majority owned by Seriti Resources, a black-owned coal mining company that has also contracted for all of the 500 GWh of electricity to be produced yearly from the first 155 MW phase of the Ummbila Emoyeni Wind Farm for its eight coal mines.
The recently released details regarding the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2025 have been welcomed by the South African wind energy sector. The new IRP provided for 34 000 MW of onshore wind generation capacity by 2039. “I think the IRP is a great step forward,” affirmed local renewable energy company Seriti Green CEO Peter Venn. “Wind projects take nine years to pout on the grid and then 20 to 25 years to operate.”
The process to lift South Africa’s dormant pebble-bed modular reactor (PBMR) project from care and maintenance is at an advanced stage, says Minister of Electricity and Energy Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. The research programme into what was essentially the development of small-scale nuclear power stations was shuttered in 2010, owing to a number of reasons, including escalating costs.
State-owned power utility Eskom says it has simplified the compliance and registration process for customers who generate their own electricity through small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) systems, such as rooftop solar panels. From October 1, residential customers can have their systems, excluding single-phase testers, signed off by a Department of Employment and Labour- (DEL-) registered person, rather than an Engineering Council of South Africa- (ECSA-) registered professional.
Investor certainty is key to unlocking South Africa’s oil and gas potential, which rivals that of neighbouring Namibia, says energy geoscience industry association EnerGeo Alliance global policy senior director Ross Compton. The organisation analysed both fiscal revenue and non-revenue benefits, such as jobs, local procurement, infrastructure development, energy planning and security, stemming from each phase of building an upstream oil and gas sector in South Africa.
A mega-scale wind project, which includes a 100-km self-build transmission line to connect into the national grid, is steadily advancing towards construction, which is currently anticipated to begin in the middle of 2026. The 720 MW Nuweveld Wind Farm is sited in the upper Karoo region of the Western Cape, and is being pursued in a partnership between independent power producer (IPP) Anthem (70%) and renewables developer Red Cap (30%), with all the electricity contracted to licensed traders.
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) has extended the deadline for written submissions and supporting evidence as part of the market inquiry into fixed charges, the generation capacity charge and other related charges levied by electricity distributors, including State-owned Eskom and municipalities, to November 8. The regulator explains that the market inquiry, launched following the publication of the Terms of Reference (TORs) on September 25, is being undertaken in terms of Section 4(b)(ii) of the Electricity Regulation Act, read with Sections 2(b) and 4(a)(viii).
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