Africa's clean energy future is stuck in grid traffic
The Webber Wentzel Power Breakfast - "Watt's the Hold-Up? Cracking Africa's Grid Access Puzzle" highlighted the absurdity that South Africa has some of the world's best solar and wind resources, billions of rands ready to be invested, and yet the biggest bottleneck is a lack of power lines and a queue nobody can properly see.
The solar panels are going up. The wind farms are being commissioned. The investment is flowing. The problem? The wires to carry all that electricity don't exist yet and the unit deciding who gets access to them still sits inside the organisation most conflicted by the answer.
That was the central tension at a recent Webber Wentzel Power Breakfast, "Watt's the Hold-Up? Cracking Africa's Grid Access Puzzle", where stakeholders from Eskom Green, SOLA Group, and the independent power producer (IPP) community gathered in Cape Town to confront what is fast becoming the continent's most urgent energy paradox.
Across the continent, hundreds of renewable energy projects are unable to connect to national or regional grids due to limited transmission capacity, outdated infrastructure, and insufficient investment in new power corridors. South Africa sits at the sharpest end of this. The 2025 Generation Connection Capacity Assessment reveals the Cape Corridor (the Northern, Western, and Eastern Cape provinces, which hold the country's best solar and wind resources) is thermally saturated, with 0 MW of traditional capacity available without curtailment.
Zero. In South Africa's renewable heartland.
The GAU problem: who guards the gate?
The most pointed remarks came from SOLA Group CEO Dom Wills, who identified a structural flaw sitting at the heart of the entire problem: Eskom's Grid Access Unit (GAU).
The NTCSA owns and manages South Africa's grid, yet the GAU, the single point of contact through which all IPPs and generators must apply for access, remains lodged inside Eskom Holdings. Eskom, as a generator, is competing with the same IPPs it is gatekeeping.
"The solution is to take NTCSA out of Eskom Holdings so that Eskom is left with generation and distribution, and to then move the grid access unit into the transmission systems operator," Wills said. "That way there is no conflict. All they do is look after the network and manage fair and transparent access."
He was equally blunt about the opacity of the current queue. Without a live, public register of grid access applications, developers have no visibility into where they stand. "It's like walking into a bank and you see a bunch of people there, but there is no queue and nobody to tell you what's going on."
Litigation, or the threat of it, has become some companies' only tool for extracting basic information about their own applications.
Wills confirmed the GAU migration is government's stated plan. His frustration is with the pace (he estimated the transmission system wouldn't fully exit Eskom until around 2029).
"The speed at which government moves out the transmission system is really important. This is the crux. It could take three years before we have clarity. This is a problem."
Eskom Green: line-jumper or legitimate player?
The breakfast also surfaced a question circulating through the IPP sector: could Eskom's newly formed renewable unit, Eskom Green, use its insider position to jump the grid queue?
Khumoetsile Kotelo, Eskom Green's head of legal, pushed back. "The grid does not lie with Eskom Green, it lies with NTCSA and the rules we already have are very clear. It is not to jump to the front of the line, but to participate in a liberal market." She noted that the NTCSA has its own board and its own governance processes, "so there was no way we could jump to the front of the line."
She did acknowledge one structural advantage no IPP can replicate: location. Eskom-owned land sits adjacent to existing substations at decommissioning coal stations, and Eskom Green is already using it. Construction started in May on a 75 MW solar plant at Lethabo power station in the Free State, the first of 17 high-priority projects across stations including Arnot, Duvha, Majuba, and Kusile, collectively targeting around 6 GW of new capacity by 2030.
Governance assurances are one thing. Wills' point stands: the cleanest resolution is structural separation, not commitments from inside the same organisation.
The reform picture and its gaps
The Electricity Regulation Amendment Act ends Eskom's de facto generation monopoly and mandates the creation of an independent Transmission System Operator. A phased Market Code implementation began in April 2026, with full market functionality targeted by 2031. The South African Wholesale Electricity Market is expected to launch in Q3 2026 - initially involving only Eskom entities, with IPPs and private participants joining from 2027.
The Eskom Restructuring Task Team, drawn from the Presidency, National Treasury, the Department of Electricity and Energy, Eskom, and the NTCSA, had a high-level report due end of May. Ramaphosa extended that to end of June. A detailed roadmap follows in August. Meanwhile, the NTCSA's transmission build programme is already under pressure, with only 270.8 km delivered against a 423 km target for FY2026.
The architecture of reform is credible, but the execution is not keeping pace.
What businesses should expect
Between 2023 and 2025, nearly 4.7 GW of private-contracted projects above 5 MW reached financial close, with an additional 18 GW sitting in the pipeline. The market is moving regardless of regulatory lag, but the gap between what's been contracted and what the grid can physically absorb is widening.
For energy-intensive businesses, the message is clear: engage now, while the framework is new enough that negotiating room still exists. For developers and investors, the opportunity is real but the execution risk is significant.
As Wills put it at the breakfast, the crux is speed. Right now, speed is the one thing this process doesn't have.
[Source: Engineering News & Moneyweb & Eskom]
