Eskom red alert
The latest data on registration of privately-operated electricity generation facilities suggest Eskom’s electricity sales will continue to plummet in the coming years.
With one more quarter remaining in 2025, the capacity of private generation registered by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) has already hit an annual record.
In November, Nersa announced it registered another 181 generation facilities in the third quarter of 2025, with a total capacity of 1,401MW.
That takes the total number of generation facilities registered from January to September 2025 to 450, just 17 short of last year, which was the highest annual number registered.
The combined capacity of 5,504MW is over 1,000MW greater than the previous full-year record of 4,490MW capacity registered in 2023.
The largest portion of the newly registered capacity in 2025 came from four wind power plants that will have a combined peak output of 750MW.
However, the vast majority of the facilities registered will use solar power for generation. A total of 175 solar power plants are planned with a cumulative capacity of 650MW.
Since Nersa began the private power registration regime in 2018, it has registered 2,236 facilities with a combined capacity of 16,040MW.
That is equal to the amount of power that could be shed under 16 load-shedding stages and about three times the capacity of one of Eskom’s newest power plants.
The combined cost of all the private generation facilities is R327.69 billion, around R122 billion less than the estimated cost of Medupi and Kusile.
These two plants have a total installed capacity of about 9,600MW, 38% less than the total registered private generation capacity since 2018.
They also took 18 years to be fully operational from the start of their construction, whereas large private solar power farms typically take two to three years to enter commercial operation after construction.
The table below provides a summary of the number of generation facilities as well as their combined capacity and investment cost registered by Nersa in each year since 2018.
| Year | Number of facilities | Capacity (MW) | Investment cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 52 | 26MW | R525 million |
| 2019 | 41 | 23MW | R464 million |
| 2020 | 124 | 53MW | R681 million |
| 2021 | 282 | 134MW | R1.89 billion |
| 2022 | 406 | 1,646MW | R25 billion |
| 2023 | 405 | 4,490MW | R84.96 billion |
| 2024 | 476 | 4,164MW | R89.54 billion |
| 2025 YTD | 450 | 5,504MW | R124.63 billion |
| Total | 2,236 | 16,040MW | R327.69 billion |
Eskom harbinger of its own doom
It is important to highlight that Nersa registration is only required for plants with capacities over 100kWp, which will primarily apply to large businesses.
Smaller rooftop and ground-based solar power systems must only be registered with their distributor. There is currently no single official source of data for the combined capacity of these systems.
However, Eskom has estimated that the total capacity of these installations stood at 7,415MW by October 2025, based on data including a decline in demand for its energy.
Even if that figure remained static by the time that all the Nersa-registered facilities are in operation, it will mean nearly 23,500MW of private power is online that did not exist in 2018.
This is one of the factors driving down demand for Eskom’s energy. In the year that the registrations began, Eskom’s total annual energy demand was 224,594GWh.
In 2024, it was 10.4% lower at 201,244GWh. The figure has continued to decline sharply in 2025, standing at roughly 4.3% less than in 2024 by the 49th week of the year.
Despite selling far less energy, the power utility’s revenues have surged due to continued above-inflation increases for nearly two decades. This is also considered a major factor in the uptake of private power.
Over the same period, the prices of solar panels, inverters, and lithium-ion batteries have plunged, making self-generation far more attractive for cost savings rather than just for energy security.
With the record-low prices of solar power systems and high grid electricity prices, self-generation is even beginning to make financial sense for smaller households.
The Bureau for Economic Research’s Robert Botha recently warned that Eskom’s cost path was unsustainable.
Botha pointed out that between March 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, the uptake of small-scale embedded generation in South Africa had increased by 350%.
Former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter also warned that Eskom’s increased costs and tariffs would push its most valuable customer to self-generation.
Unless it reduces its operating costs in conjunction with this decline, it will be forced to sharply increase tariffs to a poorer customer base, including many who cannot afford to pay for electricity.
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