Eskom battery failure

Only three of Eskom’s planned 12 battery energy storage systems (BESS) are operational, delivering less than a fifth of the power the project was supposed to at this point.

Over the same period, a single independent power producer (IPP) built a facility with more than triple the capacity of Eskom’s project.

The R11-billion BESS rollout formed part of Eskom’s Just Energy Transition (JET) programme and was intended to be the country’s largest distributed battery system.

At completion, the project was supposed to have a combined 343MW power output and 1,440MWh energy storage.

The first two successful bidders in the programme were announced in July 2022, together with a timeline for completing the projects over two phases by June 2023 and the end of December 2024, respectively.

As of June 2025, only three sites in Phase 1 were online, providing just 68MW of power with 192MWh storage.

The peak capacity is less than the amount of power supplied by many solar power stations in South Africa, which are often completed roughly a year or two after reaching financial close.

In an update in October 2024, Eskom explained that the project had been delayed due to conditions for a large government debt relief package blocking it from taking on extra debt without Treasury’s approval.

Nevertheless, Eskom said two more sites were scheduled to come online in November 2024, followed by a third addition in January 2025. These three facilities are all still under construction as of June 2025.

Eskom also said that the last two projects in Phase 1 were in the procurement process and expected to be awarded in the last quarter of 2024. That has also still not happened.

Phase 2 of the project is still in the planning phase after being deferred due to the funding issue. It was originally supposed to add another 144MW of peak output power and 616MWh of storage.

The table below summarises Eskom’s progress in the first and second phases of its BESS programme.

Private power plant proves Eskom’s progress is poor

For additional perspective on the slow pace of Eskom’s BESS rollout, it is useful to compare the project with one of South Africa’s biggest privately managed renewable energy projects.

Scatec ASA started construction on its Kenhardt hybrid plant in July 2022, the same date on which Eskom announced its first two winning bidders in the BESS rollout.

This facility includes a 540MW solar farm, the largest in the country, as well as the country’s biggest BESS with a 225MW output and 1,140MWh storage.

The system was fully completed by December 2023. Only two of Eskom’s BESS facilities were completed by then, with a combined power output of 60MW and 260MWh storage.

A year and a half later, Eskom had added just one more 8MW/32MWh facility. The Kenhardt plant alone has over three and a half times the output and six times more storage than Eskom’s entire BESS network.

Eskom’s slow progress is concerning, considering utility-scale batteries are expected to play an important part in South Africa’s more renewable energy mix, primarily as peaking power stations.

They can store excess power from solar and wind generation for discharging during high-demand periods.

In addition to Eskom’s BESS projects, the government has procured roughly 1,591MW and roughly 6,400MWh storage under its own procurement programmes.

At least four of these projects are expected to come online in 2026, the largest of which will be Globeleq’s Red Sands facility with 153MW output and 512MWh storage.

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