Municipal utilities and their role in energy resilience: Cape Town leads the way

SOUTH Africa's electricity transition is no longer only a national programme.

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CAPE Town has taken the lead as its Wheeling Bilateral Programme is complete and open to the public, says the author.

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Increasingly, it is unfolding at local government level, where resilience is being built through multiple interventions: expanding small-scale embedded generation (SSEG), adjusting tariff structures, and working with the private sector to increase access to affordable electricity while protecting municipal revenues.

The national grid remains constrained and Eskom continues to dominate supply, but municipalities are showing that local action can reduce exposure, stimulate investment, and provide households, businesses, and indigent communities with a more reliable and affordable path forward.

The core tools are not new: distributed generation, wheeling, microgrids, and storage. What is changing, is the willingness of municipalities to codify these instruments into tariffs, contracts, and policies that investors and customers can rely on.

Cape Town has taken the lead. Its Wheeling Bilateral Programme is complete and open to the public, while a Wheeling Pooling Programme is underway to test pooled wheeling across one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many arrangements.