The privately-led quintupling of rooftop solar in 2 years takes some pressure off the grid but, without planning, risks deepening energy apartheid.
At the tick of the hour, the whole neighbourhood turns dark. Residents scramble to turn on flashlights and candles. In supermarkets, shoppers stop in their tracks, patiently waiting for generators to get into gear, while businesses who cannot afford the backup batteries simply close their doors.
This scene has become habitual in South Africa, where rolling blackouts caused by an ailing electricity grid are a daily occurrence. For the past few weeks, however, Ajay Lalu's lights have stayed on. In late-February, the 50-year-old entrepreneur "bit the bullet" and invested R100,000 ($5,000) in four solar panels and a lithium battery. "Just having that ability to flip the switch and know the light will go on - it's such a relief," he says.
In his affluent neighbourhood at the foot of Table Mountain, in Cape Town, solar panels now dot the rooftops. To escape the power cuts of up to 12 hours a day - locally known as "loadshedding" - an increasing number of South Africans like Lalu are opting for private electricity generation, driving an unprecedented solar boom.
A private solar boom in South Africa
At the source of South Africa's electricity crisis are breakdowns and disruptions at its ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants. The country still derives 80% of its energy from coal, making it the continent's biggest greenhouse gas emitter - and 14th in the world. Despite South Africa's abundant solar and wind resources, the government has remained reluctant to invest in renewables for decades. A renewable energy programme introduced in 2011 has only added 6.2 GW to the grid in 13 years.
In comparison, rooftop solar additions in 2023 alone totalled 2.6 GW, according to the state-owned electricity provider Eskom. In the past two years, installed rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity has more than quintupled. South Africa is projected to become the 10th largest PV market in the world in 2024 - just as loadshedding is expected to get worse.
The installation of solar panels can benefit both their individual owners and the broader power network. "As I live alone, the bulk of my solar electricity output will get fed back into the grid," explains Lalu. "I'm contributing positively to the energy crisis".
However, the government has done little to leverage and encourage the private solar boom.
A 2023 solar tax break allowing households to claim a 25% tax rebate on their solar panels was not renewed in 2024. In February, the country's electricity minister blamed the newest bout of power cuts on "non-performing renewables", provoking the ire of the industry which has been credited with significantly diminishing loadshedding.
According to researchers Germarié Viljoen and Felix Dube, who recently published a paper on the topic, people opting to go off-the-grid are hindered by "uncertainty about the legal and financial implications".
Viljoen says Cape Town can be considered "a leader" in this context as it encourages residents and businesses to sell their surplus green energy back to the local grid. Yet Lalu says he has nonetheless encountered "a lot of red tape". Registering his solar panels will take "six to nine months", he says, during which he will get no compensation for the excess energy he feeds into the grid.
"The government is responsible for the creation of the crisis, but they haven't recognised that the private sector is actually a big part of the solution," he regrets. "We need to find ways of subsidising and bringing the cost of solar down. We missed an opportunity."
"Energy apartheid"
There are other risks associated with an unregulated solar boom. As Viljoen points out, municipalities in South Africa depend heavily on the revenue generated by selling electricity to residents. Affluent consumers moving off grid could impact municipal finances and "the ability to provide equitable services to all residents, particularly those in lower-income brackets who cannot afford to go off-the-grid".
Government officials too have warned of the risks of an "aggressive rollout" of rooftop solar. A municipality in the Eastern Cape had already recorded a R350 million ($18 million) loss in electricity sales, they said last October.
In the world's most unequal country, this could aggravate what campaigners have called an "energy apartheid". Only a few kilometres from the wealthy houses adorned with solar panels, residents of under-resourced townships are suffering the most under loadshedding, says Trevor Ngwane, chairperson of the United Front, a collective of community organisations in underserved areas outside Johannesburg.
In 2001, Ngwane co-founded the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) to "defend the working class' rights to electricity". Under the former segregationist regime, he says, "cheap Black labour was used to dig out the coal and work at power stations, but Black areas were left in the darkness". "People thought with the new government, we would get electricity," he says. "But now there's the issue that we must pay for electricity, and we also have to save electricity."
Electricity tariffs have increased 300% over the past ten years, becoming unaffordable to many. In the poorest areas, residents often set up illegal connections through a maze of cables running underground, through bushes and trees, which are regularly dismantled by police. "Load shedding strengthens the hand of Eskom and the rich [over] the working class: blaming them, demanding payment, having no sympathy," says Ngwane.
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While all efforts to avert the energy crisis and climate change are positive, "if the rich are the first ones to escape the energy crisis, this creates a lot of anxiety and anger," he adds.
To ensure a fair and effective energy transition, Viljoen says the government should adopt a "multifaceted approach" that includes allowing households to sell their solar energy back to the grid, promoting community solar projects, and encouraging municipalities to invest in their own renewable energy projects.
"We think that every human being in South Africa should be entitled to a certain basic amount of clean energy," says Ngwane. "We really want a Just Energy Transition that breathes from the ground and benefits poor people. Safe, clean, affordable energy is a sine qua non of modern existence".
This story was produced with support from the Earth Journalism Network.
Julie Bourdin is a South African-French freelance journalist based in Cape Town. Her multimedia work focuses on human rights and stories at the intersection of the personal and the political. She has reported extensively at Europe's borders on migration issues, and now focuses on stories in Southern Africa with a strong inclination for climate-related angles.
