Two wind farms outweigh 122 solar projects in South Africa’s latest registrations
NERSA registered 124 generation facilities between April and June carrying 804MW and R20.18 billion of investment. Two wind facilities account for 568MW of it. The regulator has now registered 20,131MW since 2018.
Two wind farms carry 568MW of the 804MW South Africa’s regulator registered in the three months to June. The other 122 facilities are solar photovoltaic and produce 236MW between them.
Investment behind all 124 came to R20.18 billion, at an average of R25,099 per kilowatt. Sixty-one connect to the Eskom network and account for 757MW and roughly R19.5 billion. The other 63 sit on municipal distribution networks, carrying 47MW and R639 million.
Northern Cape alone drew R11.934 billion. Mpumalanga and Gauteng followed on capacity and investment, while Western Cape, Gauteng and Limpopo registered the greatest number of facilities.
NERSA processed the 124 applications in an average of ten working days, against eleven for the 111 it handled in the same quarter last year.
Registration replaced licensing for private generation in 2018. Since then the regulator has registered 2,619 facilities carrying 20,131MW and around R409 billion of investment.
Eskom’s April winter outlook projected a 6GW surplus in peak capacity and no load shedding through to the end of August, with the energy availability factor reaching 65.35% against 54.55% in 2023. The utility also flagged that only about half the renewable projects awarded grid allocation and offtake agreements since IRP 2019 have been built, which it identified as a supply adequacy risk between 2029 and 2030.
What the quarter shows is both halves of that arriving at once. Utility-scale wind in the Northern Cape at R25,000 a kilowatt, and a long tail of small solar landing on municipal networks that were not built to receive it.
