Nick Headley writes about energy matters more than about other matters, and his latest column on He's twenty four argues for a national roof top solar procurement program.

Why Nick, good afternoon.

Hi John, Thanks for having me.

So.

I think the biggest reason here is South Africa is fast running running out of available grid capacity.

So where our best specific in particular wind and solar resources are are in the three Cape provinces, and there's no longer any available grid capacity there to connect new projects.

So if we kind of move energy consumption close or production close to where it's consumed, in other words, generate close to where businesses are, that kind of solves the transmission issue.

This is it's certainly not a full solve, but we can put a huge amount of energy generation capacity on the rooftops of big warehouses and malls and shopping complexes and things like that.

When things seem as obvious as they seem when pointed out by somebody like yourself in the way that you pointed out, one of the questions I immediately have in my head is if it's so obviously a benefit, why isn't it being done?

So I think the first point would probably be that rooftop solar is a bit more expensive than the traditional kind of grid scale really big stuff.

So just as a kind of ballpark estimate, a big ground mountain solar farm in say the Northern Cap can deliver powered around sixty cent ciculored hour, whereas an installation on the roof of a warehouse or big shopping mall would deliver powered about one random kulor hour.

So that's kind of the main reason you get obviously economies of scale by doing things really big.

But on the other hand, that one rand to killo what hour for rooftop solar is still rarely competitive.

So if we had to build a new caulified powerline, for example, it would cast a round one round fifty one round sixty a killer what hour.

So one round for rooftop solar is still a really good deal.

It's not as cheap as the big solar farms, but it's still a really good deal.

But that's probably the reason that hasn't really gotten much attention yet.

Should there be well, let me slightly rephrase that, what kind of program?

Should there be?

Two?

Excuse me?

Encourage people to go ahead with this.

When you talk about a National rooftop solo procurement program.

What in your mind would that consist of.

Yeah, so at the moment that it's all being very much private sector driven.

So a lot of shopping malls have installed rooftop solar, a lot of warehouses have already, but we are still rarely barely scratching the surface of our potential there.

So there was a recent University of Pretoria study showing just commercial buildings could host twelve gigawats of solar panels, so the program could look like something like what France and Germany have done.

So France, for example, is now done ten rooftop solar procurement rounds.

They do one every couple of months where they ask private developers to bid to put rooftop solar on warehouses and shopping malls and office blocks and things like that, and then sell that power into the grid and they're procuring a lot, like a really large amount of energy this way.

The most recent one was just around two ndred megawats of solar from fifty four big rooftop projects.

Germany has been doing something similar and we can kind of ye learn from the way those procurement rounds were designed and adapted obviously for local conditions and do something similar.

Yeah.

In other words, there would be complementing what the private sexors are already doing with a government led procurement round.

With any kind of financial inducement.

And you know it wouldn't be necessary.

It would private developers would be able to bid at, say, for example, one round a kilodo, which is already rarely competitive and wouldn't need any kind of real incentives there.

And are there, or if they aren't, could there fairly quickly be the sufficient number of private developers?

I mean, I know there are a lot of people operating in private renewable energy projects.

Are there enough to take on something of the sort of scale that you're suggesting, And if they're not, could they be created relatively quickly to do the job properly?

It's a good question.

So in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four, when load shedding was at its worst ever, we obviously saw a huge boom in rooftop solar installations as kind of households and businesses were trying to shield themselves from power cuts.

So at the time we developed this really big ecosystem of installation companies and developers and a lot of electricians were trained up.

However, there's been a big luvel since so when load shedding stopped, we kind of a lot of work dried up and the whole rooftop solo drive really kind of slowed down.

So there is a lot of capacity in the market now that is kind of sitting unused, and that is a bit of a risk.

That obviously puts a lot of jobs on the line, and doing a rooftop solo procurement program would be one way to kind of keep the market moving along and keep it growing.

So to answer your question, yes, there's a lot of capacity and it could still be scaled up further.

Freelance energy analyst and writer Nick Headley, thanks for chatting to us.

Nick,