Author: MATSHELA KOKO
MTSAO 2027–2031: An Open Letter to NERSA, Before You Concur
The coal exit is dated in law. The replacement is not. Three decisions by the…
The Hormuz Warning South Africa Refuses to Hear
Three months ago, I published a paper documenting a gap almost nobody wanted to look…
Eskom’s Turnaround Is Real and Raises a Question Worth Asking
Eskom’s recent operational results deserve to be taken at face value, because they are genuinely…
Unbundling Eskom’s Grid Will Not, on Its Own, Close the Transmission Gap
The argument over Eskom’s transmission assets has settled into two camps. Eskom chair Mteto Nyati…
South Africa’s 2030 Electricity Cliff: Why Storage Alone Won’t Close the Gap
A sentence buried in South Africa’s own grid operator adequacy modelling deserves far more attention than it has received. Even with every available battery and pumped-storage scheme dispatched at full tilt during the evening peak, the projected shortfall for 2030 still does not close. That admission comes from the National Transmission Company South Africa’s Medium-Term System Adequacy Outlook 2026–2030 (MTSAO 2025). It is not a critic’s warning about the pace of the energy transition. It is the system operator’s own…
The Gas Bridge South Africa Can’t Afford
South Africa faces a real capacity cliff between 2029 and March 2030: roughly 9.5 GW of dispatchable capacity, driven mostly by coal retirements under Minimum Emission Standards and the expiry of the Cahora Bassa import contract. IRP 2025’s answer — around 6 GW of imported LNG-fired CCGT — solves the availability problem on paper, but converts it into an affordability and currency problem that current planning barely models. Worse, NERSA’s new electricity Trading Rules (Version 3, May 2026) create a…
Germany and Britain Are Learning the Hard Way What South Africa Still Has Time to Plan For
The Diagnostic We Already Have Germany and Great Britain both had a difficult stretch this summer. On 23 June, grid frequency in Great Britain fell below the safe operating limit for a sustained period during the evening peak, with no market warning issued, and the system operator curtailed exports to the Netherlands and France to bring it back under control [15]. On 24 and 26 June, it issued electricity margin notices it had never issued in summer before [15]. Then,…
Eskom Cannot Build Its Way Into Your City. The Court Just Confirmed It.
On the morning of 8 June 2026, a judgment landed quietly in the Gauteng Division of the High Court. No fanfare. No public broadcast. Just 18 pages from Judge Anthony Millar that, in my reading, redraw the legal boundaries of South Africa’s electricity sector more definitively than anything that has come before — including the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act. The case is City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality v National Energy Regulator of South Africa & Eskom Holdings SOC Limited [1].…
Two Grids, One Diagnostic: What Britain’s Constraint Crisis Reveals About South Africa’s 2030 Cliff
On 20 May 2026, Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) issued a market notice restricting its ability to reverse power flows across interconnectors with France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium [2]. The restriction, effective immediately and in place until year-end, is the latest consequence of a structural problem that NESO’s own statutory reporting has been documenting for several years. According to the 2025 Annual Balancing Costs Report — published under Condition C9 of the NESO Electricity System Operator Licence —…
The Minister’s Determination and the Legislated Capacity Cliff: What South Africa’s Energy Planning Community Must Now Confront
A Determination That Redefines the 2030 Capacity Cliff from Planning Risk toLegal Certainty On 31 March 2025, the then Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Dr D.T. George, issued his determination on the exemption applications submitted by Eskom SOC (Pty) Ltd in terms of Section 59 of the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act, 2004[1]. The decision received measured coverage in the energy press. It deserved considerably more. The determination did not merely resolve a regulatory dispute about particulate…
Rearranging Deck Chairs on a Sinking Grid: Why South Africa’s ERAA Is the Wrong Reform at the Worst Possible
Moment in Energy History-Part 2 South Africa has chosen to liberalise its electricity sector at the precise historical moment that the global energy order is being structurally rewritten—not by governments, not by regulators, but by the world’s most capitalised private corporations quietly building their own power stations and walking away from the grid entirely. The Electricity Regulation Amendment Act (ERAA) of 2024 is not merely a policy error of local dimension; it is a category mistake of global consequence, timed…
The Mirage of Reform: Why the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act is a Death Warrant for South Africa’s Energy Security
The South African state is currently engaged in a high-stakes gamble with the nation’s industrial backbone. Under the banner of “modernisation” and “liberalisation,” the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act (ERAA) is being touted as the panacea for the rolling blackouts which first appeared in 2008. In his 2026 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa insisted that these reforms—specifically the unbundling of Eskom and the creation of an independent Transmission System Operator (TSO)—will proceed at all costs. In his budget…