Solar and water tank adopters are forcing government to adapt or die

In the breach left by failing local government services, citizens have been making alternative plans for years, buying solar panels to get off the electricity grid, digging boreholes to tap underground water and purchasing water tanks to help them get through water outages and throttling.

Frustrated by load-shedding, South Africans imported R17.5 billion of solar panels, inverters and lithium-ion batteries in the first nine months of 2024, according to the deputy minister of energy and electricity, Samantha Graham-Maré. And to alleviate water shortages, they are drilling 80  000 to 100  000 boreholes across the country annually, according to the department of water and sanitation, with only 282  630 boreholes actually registered (as of October 2024 in the National Groundwater Archive). 

Although solar panels, boreholes and water tanks provide a viable, if expensive, solution, they don’t address the core issue in most parts of the country, most notably Johannesburg, as the Mail & Guardian reported last week: local governments’ inability to maintain reliable water and electricity provision, resulting from decades of underfunding and neglect, not to mention corruption. 

Confounding this scenario are the consequences — seen and unseen — of citizens governing themselves. Last month, for example, an illegal private borehole disrupted the Gautrain service near Rosebank, costing at least R1  million to fix and prompting the Gautrain Management Company to initiate legal action against the property owner, on multiple contraventions of local by-laws as well as for allegedly flouting the Gauteng Transport Infrastructure Act. 

Aside from potential damage to underground utilities, illegal borehole drilling can increase the risk of ground subsidence. “There is a significant lack of monitoring and regulation of groundwater usage (by the City of Johannesburg), leading to a free-for-all scenario,” executive director of WaterCAN, Ferrial Adam, told The Citizen newspaper last month.

Ensuring that citizens adhere to legal procedures, which include obtaining necessary borehole permits and conducting environmental assessments, is an expensive exercise, including administrative costs, monitoring, enforcement actions and public awareness campaigns. Ironic, given that water leakages — which means that water is pumped from source but “lost” in distribution to leaky infrastructure or illegal connections before it reaches the customer — are a major contributor to South Africa’s non-revenue water problem. 

Tanks are being installed to collect rainwater but there is a growing trend of these tanks being linked to the municipal system. For example, the residents in Melville, Johannesburg, have banded together to buy several such water tanks. The downside of this practice is it exacerbates municipal water supply problems. 

Adam said that after water cuts, people using municipal water to fill up their tanks are depleting the water particularly for people living in high-lying areas and this results in “more people [who] have less water”.

In Johannesburg, sustainably solving the water scarcity problem is still years away. 

“Unfortunately, the second phase of the Lesotho Highlands Project [to build another dam in the Lesotho mountains to bring more water to Gauteng] started nine years late, and is only going to be completed to be able to supply additional water to Gauteng in 2028,” the water and sanitation department’s director general, Sean Phillips, said on Newzroom Afrika recently.

In respect of water infrastructure repair and maintenance, an oft-proposed solution is public-private partnerships, but as Good Governance Africa researcher Leleti Maluleke stresses, any solution is dependent on good governance.

“Although the budget is there to upgrade, some municipalities spend less than what is required to maintain their infrastructure. In fact, some of the better-resourced municipalities spend less than 1% of their budget on maintenance repairs,” she wrote in M&G last year. “Infrastructure degradation underscores the need for long-term policy and legislative measures to enhance accountability and maintenance.” 

Meanwhile, Eskom and local government authorities are having to adjust to the surge of privately installed solar power, which presents a real conundrum: while solar power helps reduce strain on the national grid and cuts carbon emissions, it also results in revenue loss from traditional electricity sales, grid stability issues, and increased maintenance costs. 

Data from the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association shows just how much South Africans have adopted solar: 961 megawatts of solar capacity was added in the first 10 months of last year, totalling 8.97 gigawatts, an 11.9% increase from 2023. South Africa’s total installed electricity generation capacity is only 48.52GW. 

If more citizens, especially in Johannesburg, turn to solar power, Eskom’s financial struggles will be further exacerbated, remembering that it is the citizens who can most afford to pay Eskom’s tariffs who are choosing to switch to alternative sources. In other words, Eskom risks entering what’s known as a “utility death spiral”, which will undermine its long-term viability. 

To mitigate its losses, Eskom has been trying to restructure its tariffs, and at the beginning of this year, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) gave the utility approval for a 12% tariff increase for 2025-26, and also for its new Retail Tariff Plan, which entails new time-of-use charges, fixed capacity, network and service charges. Essentially this means all Joburg residents still connected to the grid, whether they use municipal electricity or not, will pay Eskom.

Nersa has also approved credits to feed in excess electricity to the grid, but this is dependent on solar photovoltaic owners registering their installations and paying costly application, tariff conversion and connection fees. In Johannesburg, the proposed feed-in tariffs are 85.50 cents per kilowatt hour for residential users and 70.85 cents per kWh for business and large power users, compensation that will take many years of energy exports to recover the initial installation, registration and connection costs.

Nonetheless, the shift to solar is expected to continue apace, encouraged by its increasing affordability. 

“In South Africa, generating solar power is often cheaper than purchasing municipal electricity,” says Andrew Middleton, chief executive of GoSolr, one of a plethora of solar providers in what has become a highly competitive market. “We’ve also seen substantial reductions in the cost of solar panels, batteries and inverters in dollar terms. These prices are expected to remain stable unless major technological breakthroughs, such as battery chemistries like sodium-ion technology, lead to further cost reductions.” 

In part to accommodate renewables, which must become part of South Africa’s energy future, the government is busy unbundling Eskom’s generation, transmission and distribution divisions. It has established an Independent Transmission System and Market Operator (ITSMO) state-owned entity, which must integrate renewable energy from independent producers. It must also balance this with the phasing-out of aging coal plants, a key issue that could impact its costs and sustainability. 

The overall vision of the ITSMO is to move away from Eskom’s monopoly and involve more diverse players in the energy sector to ensure a stable, competitive and greener electricity supply for South Africa. A present deficiency that must be urgently addressed is that the national transmission grid does not have enough ingestion points to load all the available renewable “stock” from areas such as the Northern and Eastern Capes. 

Coordination and smart policy design, then, are critical to stabilising both the country’s economy and the future of Eskom, which ultimately remains responsible for providing electricity to all citizens, in particular those who can’t afford rooftop solar.  Those who can afford it are inadvertently forcing the government to adapt to competition by the private sector. Chris Hattingh, the director of the Centre for Risk Analysis, says this is a positive development. 

Speaking to Terence Corrigan, writing forAfrica in Fact, Hattingh says, “A sense of pragmatism and the harshness of reality could force the government to realise it must make room for private-sector and civil-society actions and solutions.” As Corrigan concluded, “Resolving the challenge of electricity provision will take not just a combination of suitable technology — which fortuitously is becoming available — but a change in official mindsets and a dogged society to demand it.”

This speaks to citizens being a critical cog in the governance of their own service provision, not only by adopting alternatives in solar, boreholes and water tanks, but by working together as communities advocating for sustainable policies that keep government service providers fair and accountable. 

As former president Thabo Mbeki once said, “A democratic state, once established, is not self-sustaining. It depends on an active and vigilant citizenry that holds it accountable.” 

Helen Grange is a writer and sub-editor at Good Governance Africa.