A South African ministerial delegation, led by Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, travelled to Beijing in early August to present the country’s long-term power programme to Chinese state group POWERCHINA. The \u00ab\u00a0South Africa-China Electricity & Energy Investment Conference\u00a0\u00bb was held on August 3 and 4, 2026 at POWERCHINA’s headquarters, before a promotional statement relayed the event on August 11 and 12. Pretoria’s stated goal was to attract Chinese capital and contractors into generation, transmission and storage.<\/p>\n
An investment pipeline built on the power master plan<\/p>\n
The backbone of South Africa’s pitch is its Integrated Resource Plan, recently published in the government gazette, which sets the trajectory for adding new generation capacity through the end of the next decade and quantifies the corresponding investment pipeline in cumulative net present value. The document charts a pivot away from historical coal dependence toward a diversified mix combining onshore wind, solar, battery storage, gas and a nuclear revival. Its drafters frame this shift as a move from policy risk to execution risk: the question is no longer what to build, but whether the country can build it.<\/p>\n
Across the African continent, solar commissioning activity continues in parallel, illustrated by the 27 MWp hybrid solar park commissioned by Globeleq in Zambia<\/a>, while governments diversify their financing mechanisms, as shown by Spain’s allocation of 612 million euros to 173 wind and hydroelectric projects<\/a>. The South African delegation also included Parks Tau, Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, Thandi Moraka, Deputy Minister of International Relations, along with Eskom executives and development finance institution officials. On the Chinese side, Wang Xiaojun, POWERCHINA’s recently appointed general director, referred to as \u00ab\u00a0president\u00a0\u00bb in English-language statements, and Wang Peng, executive vice president of the China Development Bank, took part in the discussions.<\/p>\n The transmission network, the identified bottleneck<\/p>\n The most operational point of the conference concerned the transmission network, seen as the main bottleneck of South Africa’s power programme. This segment was unbundled from Eskom into a dedicated company, the National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA), whose network development plan calls for building new lines at a rate far above the historical pace, at a considerable decade-long cost and with a massive expansion of transformer capacity, measured in megavolt-amperes (MVA). Before Chinese investors, NTCSA chief executive Monde Bala quantified the funding gap for the company’s medium-term priority projects, calling on development banks, commercial banks and equipment suppliers to step in.<\/p>\n An independent transmission programme is separately opening the network to private-sector participation, alongside public investment led by Eskom and NTCSA. The meeting was meant to lead to an energy investment partnership project between South Africa and China, which at this stage remains an intention: no financial commitment was announced in the independent sources reviewed.<\/p>\n POWERCHINA, a builder more than a developer<\/p>\n POWERCHINA, a Chinese state engineering-construction conglomerate and parent company of the Sinohydro and SEPCOIII brands, positions itself as a natural partner for executing South Africa’s programme. On the country’s flagship projects, however, the group has mainly acted as a builder rather than a developer or asset owner. The Redstone concentrated solar power tower plant illustrates this: it was developed and is owned by Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power alongside South African public shareholders, with its molten-salt technology making it the first installation of its kind on the continent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A South African ministerial delegation, led by Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, travelled to Beijing in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[123],"tags":[140,40948,55240],"class_list":["post-181111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afrique-du-sud","tag-afrique-du-sud","tag-power-grids","tag-south-africa-power-investment"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@afrique\/117088129089068393","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/afrique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}