Eskom blocks Traders from Virtual Wheeling, impeding market liberalisation progress.
In a presentation at an EE Business Intelligence webinar on 5 June 2025, Eskom announced that its Virtual Wheeling product launched about three months ago is not available to licenced electricity traders in South Africa. Mutenda Tshipala, Senior Manager: Strategy Development at Eskom Distribution, expressed his view that South Africa is and has been “acting recklessly” in its approach to electricity trading.
Francis
In a presentation at an EE Business Intelligence webinar on 5 June 2025, Eskom announced that its Virtual Wheeling product launched about three months ago is not available to licenced electricity traders in South Africa. Mutenda Tshipala, Senior Manager: Strategy Development at Eskom Distribution, expressed his view that South Africa is and has been “acting recklessly” in its approach to electricity trading.
This announcement appears to have taken the ten currently licenced electricity traders by surprise. It appears that this stance has to do with Eskom's Distribution’s stated intention in November 2024 to challenge the award of trading licences by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) in court.
This announcement by Eskom Distribution significantly pulls the rug from under the Virtual Wheeling mechanism, and from Traders wanting to wheel green electricity to the aggregated demand of large number of small, medium and even larger-sized enterprises. In the meantime, following the decisions by NERSA to grant electricity trading licences to the last five applications by prospective electricity traders over objections from Eskom Distribution, the Regulator has finally published its Reasons for Decision (RfD) for three of the five applications.
It now remains to be seen whether Eskom will follow through with its threat to challenge NERSA’s trader licensing decisions in a court action. At the time, Eskom argued that the trading licences violated NERSA’s own regulatory framework and threatened grid stability, that the electricity trading licences infringed its exclusive electricity distribution licence, and that the Traders will be cherry-picking “Eskom’s customers”.
Some analysts feel that these actions by Eskom Distribution impede the liberalisation of the electricity sector and the country’s economy, and frustrate the emergence of a diversified and competitive generation sector in South Africa.
Source: EE Business Intelligence
