Traded power market for SA

FIRST STEP: REGULATOR LICENSES 10 TRADERS

- Bloomberg

South Africa is on the cusp of starting a traded electricity market that will give consumers a choice of power products along with a range of pricing options, according to a top investment bank.

SA has relied on state-owned Eskom for the bulk of its electricity supply for more than a century.

Mismanagement and underinvestment at the utility led to record outages in 2023, causing government to allow private companies to build power plants of any size to meet their own needs and to sell to the grid.

Now the country has opened the market to licensed traders, an area FirstRand unit Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) is backing.

"It's the beginning of a traded electricity market in South Africa," Judy Kobus, head of infrastructure sector solutions at RMB, which is providing financing solutions to traders, said in an interview in Johannesburg.