Ramokgopa kickstarts SA’s private sector-powered grid expansion

Minister of Electricity and Energy Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa on Tuesday morning introduced the Independent Transmission Programme (ITP), marking the first major step in bringing private capital into South Africa’s historically state-owned transmission monopoly.

“We want to create a dispensation where we are going to accommodate the investments by private sector players on the transmission side,” he said. 

The minister announced that on Friday, 28 March, he issued a Ministerial Determination under Section 34 of the Electricity Regulation Act. 

The determination identifies seven corridors totalling more than 1,000km, specifically earmarked for private sector funding and construction.

Ramokgopa noted South Africa had to achieve 5% annual economic growth to meet NDP targets – something currently unattainable due in large part to constraints in electricity infrastructure.

“Our renewable energy assets are not fully exploited as a result of the constraints on the transmission side,” the minister said. The project aims to unlock 3,222 megawatts by August 2029. 

“Our view is that there’s a need for us to ensure that we are able to accelerate and support transmission infrastructure development.”

Much has been made of South Africa’s laggardly attempts to bring online additional, low-carbon generation capacity as it seeks to simultaneously reduce the economy’s carbon intensity, ensure energy security and retire coal-fired power stations in line with climate policies and health imperatives. 

Read more: Grid capacity a significant obstacle to renewables transition and fixing load shedding

Eskom’s Generation Connection Capacity Assessment (GCCA) 2025 report, which was published in October 2023, notes that “Parts of the transmission network located within the most favourable areas for wind and photovoltaic (PV) generation such as the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Hydra Central have no capacity, as all of the capacity has been depleted from previous bid window rounds and private off-takers.

“The depletion of generation connection capacity in these areas has resulted in many generation projects being denied connection. These areas remain in high demand due to their abundant energy resources for renewable generation.”

Ronald Marais, Transmission Strategic Grid Planning Manager at the National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA), said in September 2024 that “If we look at the capacity that aims to be connected to the grid, it’s more than doubled — from 66 gigawatts in last year’s survey to nearly 134 gigawatts. This remarkable increase offers great insights into where capacity needs to be unlocked on the grid.” 

Marais was speaking in a webinar unveiling the results of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Grid Survey.

Despite all of this, no new utility-scale capacity was brought online in 2024 according to the Council for Scientific Research’s (CSIR’s) most recent utility-scale power generation statistics in South Africa report, published last month.

By the end of 2024, South Africa had 6,320MW of operational renewable energy capacity and just over 3,300MW of pumped storage and hydro.


Read more: SA’s grid transformation — Eskom’s R112bn plan for electricity ‘freeways’ as future generation heads to Cape provinces

Segomoco Scheppers, interim CEO of the NTCSA, conceded in a November 2024 interview with this reporter that the speed at which he and his team can do their job will indirectly determine – in part – the pace at which South Africa can increase the proportion of renewable energy relative to fossil fuels in the country’s energy mix along with all its attendant benefits.

He explained that “you could almost think of a transmission as the freeways” taking electricity from generators before the offramps and smaller roads of distribution take it to the end user.

Referring to the Cape provinces, he said: “You are having significant renewable energy resources being developed in areas that traditionally had no generation, so you did not need transmission in those places, or at least not the same level of transmission.

“So with the way that the dynamic of the power system is shifting, we don’t have a strong enough transmission network to actually collect those generation resources and to move them long distances, relatively speaking, because you now want to collect this power from the southern part of the country and move it to… where you have more robust industrial demand.”

South Africa’s transmission infrastructure at present amounts to about 33,000km of lines, roughly 170 substations and about 575 large transformers. The Transmission Development Plan released at the end of October 2024 is Eskom and NTCSA’s most recent update to its transmission strategy.

To accommodate the anticipated 56GW of new generation capacity expected online by 2034, the TDP 2024 necessitates the construction of 14,500km of new high-voltage transmission lines and the addition of 210 transformers.

The bulk of this 56GW “will be wind and solar PV”, Scheppers said at the time. 

“There will be some gas generation, for example, in the mix and a few other technologies, but the bulk of that generation is going to be renewable, wind and solar.” 

The plan aims to achieve an additional 5,043km of power lines by the end of the 2029 financial year.

Speaking at Tuesday’s media briefing, Ramokgopa provided an update on how the ITP pilot and its seven corridors aim to give these ambitions a boost. 

These corridors are in three provinces: the Northern Cape, North West, and Gauteng. The Northern Cape has got some of the highest-quality solar radiation on the planet, said the minister. 

“It’s by no mistake that we have exhausted capacity in the Northern Cape. For us to continue to benefit from that endowment, we must focus on the Northern Cape as an area of investment… the NTCSA’s balance sheet is not sufficient, the sovereign balance sheet is not sufficient, so we’re looking to the private sector to make these investments.”

But how will it work?