With the public comment period on South Africa’s draft Revised Electricity Pricing Policy (EPP 2026) due to close in the coming weeks, Rogan Davies, Group CEO of Rhino Energy Solutions (RES), a Sandton-based solar EPC+M company, is calling on South African business to stop treating solar and battery storage as separate decisions.
“Three things are happening to the electricity market at the same time, and any business still weighing solar and storage as two separate purchases is missing an opportunity,” says Davies. “Grid tariffs keep climbing well ahead of inflation. The draft pricing policy now open for comment is set to change how embedded generation is billed. And the cost of the batteries that make solar dispatchable, not just intermittent, has just fallen to its lowest level on record. On their own, each is a talking point. Together, they’re the strongest case South African business has ever had for pairing solar with storage.”
Three forces, one direction of travel
Rising tariffs. NERSA approved average tariff increases of 8.76% for Eskom’s direct customers and 9.01% for municipal customers for the 2026/27 financial year – the latest in a run of increases that have repeatedly outpaced consumer inflation. The new EPP also proposes that NERSA sets pricing for at least 5 years in advance, this will then give businesses some insight into future electrical costs and further strengthen the business case as grid tariffs are known. It is unlikely that these tariff increases will be below CPI. Every year a business delays a self-generation decision, RES argues, it locks in another above inflation increase across its entire grid consumption.
A regulatory shift. Under the draft EPP 2026, RES says all embedded generation customers will move onto time-of-use (TOU) tariffs, turning solar’s value proposition from a flat rand-per-kWh saving into one that depends on when energy is used or exported. “A battery, not a PV array on its own, is what lets a business shift consumption to capture that value,” Davies says. “Solar without storage increasingly leaves money on the table under a mandatory TOU regime.” Further to this, any customer who operates a business for longer-than-usual 9 to 5 hours will be exposed to very expensive peak tariff charges in the early morning and evening periods and not using a Solar and BESS solution to offset these higher chargers will be detrimental to the overall operating costs.
Falling battery prices. Bloomberg NEF’s December 2025 survey found global lithium-ion battery pack prices fell 8% during 2025 to a record low of $108/kWh, with stationary storage, the category BESS falls into, the cheapest application of all at around $70/kWh, down 45% on 2024. “The economics of adding storage to a solar system have rarely moved this fast in the client’s favour,” says Davies.
GreenCape’s 2025 Market Intelligence Report puts South Africa’s addressable behind-the-meter opportunity in the commercial, industrial and agricultural sector at roughly R10 billion (2GWh) of BESS and R53 billion (3.8GW) of embedded solar by 2030.
“Grid electricity keeps getting more expensive. Regulation increasingly rewards flexibility over raw kWh generation. And the hardware to capture that flexibility keeps getting cheaper. That’s not three separate trends – it’s one direction of travel,” Davies says.
“We no longer propose Grid Tied solar PV as a standalone product to our clients. Every serious design we bring to a boardroom now pairs solar with storage, sized around the client’s actual load and tariff structure. The businesses that act while battery prices are falling, and before the new tariff structures are finalised, will lock in the best solar-plus-storage economics this market has offered since the technology first arrived on South African rooftops.
“There’s a tendency for local businesses to delay a solar decision. But the opportunity cost is real, with a typical payback period of around three years, every year spent deciding is a year they could have already been past payback and banking the benefits. If they’d taken the decision instead, the system would be paid off by now, and the solar installation would already be delivering its full value.”
