What India's clean-power experiment reveals about South Africa's reform gap

A recently published report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Budgeting for Net Zero: Powering India's Reliable Clean Energy Future (2025), examines how India is attempting to replace coal with clean power that is both reliable and dispatchable.

- Thomas Garner

While the study is grounded in Indian policy and market conditions, its conclusions carry direct relevance for South Africa as it grapples with electricity market reform under conditions of institutional stress.

The IISD report analyses India's firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE) procurement models, which combine solar, wind, and battery storage to deliver power across defined hours or profiles.

The intention is explicit. Renewable energy must behave as a system resource rather than a marginal supplement. Variability is no longer treated as the grid's problem.

It is pushed back onto generators through contractual obligations. This logic will be familiar to South African policymakers. Eskom's system has long relied on coal to provide firmness and flexibility in the absence of mature power markets. Load-shedding exposed the cost of that dependence, but it did not remove the underlying requirement for dispatchable capacity. As South Africa pursues unbundling, market reform, and increased private participation, the same question arises. How should reliability be delivered, and who should pay for it?