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The newly-gazetted Electricity Generation Act regulations will allow private individuals and businesses to generate up to 100MW of electricity for their own use without obtaining a licence from the National Electricity Regulator, says Andrew Schaefer, managing director of property management company Trafalgar. Read More 

It will cost around R250,000 to install a power generation and storage system that is sufficient to take a small household off of Eskom’s grid. This is according to Nick Roche, chief product officer at Rubicon, a South African energy company that distributes solutions like Tesla’s Powerwall backup battery system. Many households have grown tired of Eskom’s load-shedding and increasing prices and are looking into ways to power their homes themselves. Read More 

You can sell excess solar power back to govt – but it may take around 7 years to break even Small-scale embedded generators can get around 72 cents for every kilowatt hour pumped back into the grid via a bi-directional electrical meter. These solar power systems cost upwards of R200,000 and can be paid off in seven years by combining savings with municipal feed-in tariffs. But additional monthly charges and the system’s 15-to-25-year lifespan are causes for careful consideration. Energy experts are calling for feed-in tariffs to be increased, to shorten the pay-back time. Read full article here

The solar industry has spent decades slashing the cost of generating electricity direct from the sun. Now it's focusing on making panels even more powerful. Read full article here