Matthew Cruise energy analyst at Jaltech
South African businesses are sitting on thousands of underperforming solar systems because they were never installed to save money on their energy bills.
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During the load shedding crisis, businesses spent tens of billions of rand on solar and battery systems to keep the lights on.
Little consideration went into sizing systems for cost efficiency, matching output to actual usage patterns or optimising for the time of day when electricity is most expensive.
The result is a country with underperforming solar systems.
Jaltech, one of SA’s largest commercial solar owners, plans to invest R500 million to acquire these systems and fund the improvements needed to unlock energy savings.
Commercial solar owners
“During load shedding, companies became desperate to keep their operations running, and this led to the biggest solar rush globally,” says Matthew Cruise, energy analyst at Jaltech. “The problem is that these systems were never built around savings. To retrofit and optimise them to start seeing any real benefit, businesses would now have to collectively invest billions of rand. Most don’t have the capital or the technical capability to do that.”
The commercial solar owner has already acquired and refinanced hundreds of solar assets across the country, saving companies millions in electricity costs while giving the original owners an opportunity to recover most of their investment in the asset.
Rather than leaving businesses to fund their own retrofits, Jaltech buys these underperforming systems and takes on the cost and complexity of optimisation. Owners then sign a power purchase agreement with Jaltech, locking in a lower tariff without having to fund the upgrade themselves.
“The system that got businesses through load shedding is not the system that will save it money today,” Cruise adds. “The opportunity is to rework these assets around how the business actually consumes electricity and turn the emergency investment into long-term cost-savings.”
