By Maximus Njaba, in Cape Town
The City of Cape Town will publish a tender on February 13, 2026 for an electricity trading company to provide additional power to the metropolis, outside of the grid.
Africa’s leading tourist hub, with a population of 5Million residents, has been seeking to break free from the monopoly of power generation and distribution held by Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, South Africa’s state owned utility.
Cape Town wants to be both electricity generator as well as purchaser. The city currently relies on Eskom for over 1,000 MW of its base load requirements; now it is building 60 megawatts of generation capacity itself, while it looks to buy in 300 megawatts of power, outside of what it receives from Eskom.
In the last 15 years, Cape Town suffered, along with the rest of the country, severe outages in power supply, as Eskom struggled to meet demand from its old and poorly maintained coal fired plants.
The country has emerged from the worst in the last 15 months, and the system is undergoing a reform led transition to a mix of state and private supply of wholesale electricity. Cape Town is taking advantage of the fact that the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) has awarded approximately 16 trading licences to private entities as of December 31, 2025.
The city previously negotiated with several suppliers of electricity, but with South African laws amended to allow operations of trading platforms, Cape Town is changing tack. It now plans to outsource the task of securing power to a private company that can buy it from a range of providers.
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