Eskom’s grid is stronger than it has been in years. That’s great news, but the real question is not whether the lights are on today. It’s about how long this can last and on what foundations it rests.
Much of Eskom’s recovery has been achieved by stabilising and extending the performance of the existing coal fleet. This has bought some breathing room but underlines a central fragility: South Africa’s electricity stability is dependent on coal infrastructure at a time when coal has become unfinanceable.
Global capital — banks, multilaterals and private investors — are tightening climate conditions, while carbon-intensive production is increasingly penalised. Domestically, extending the life of coal plants is expensive, environmentally contested and ultimately finite. Temporary emissions exemptions may keep capacity online for a few more years, but these are temporary bridges.
The deeper constraint lies beyond generation. Wind and solar are now cheap forms of new power, but their deployment at scale depends on a transmission grid that is neither extensive nor flexible enough to absorb intermittent energy. South Africa faces an enormous investment requirement in transmission lines, substations, storage and system-balancing technologies. These are capital-intensive projects with long payback periods.
This is where the global climate-finance model begins to fail developing countries. Renewable energy financing has been tardy, highly conditional and skewed toward generation projects rather than system-wide infrastructure. Solar panels and wind turbines photograph well, transmission lines less so and coal conjures up satanic mills. As a result, funding flows favour discrete projects while the grid remains undercapitalised and fossils fuels ignored.
The real question is not whether gas or coal is clean but whether energy transitions are being designed around physics, economics and development realities, or around ideology.
The prevailing model reflects the assumptions of advanced economies: dense grids, mature capital markets and surplus capacity. It is poorly adapted to countries that face development imperatives such as industrialisation, electrification and job creation, and that sit on, or are able to access, abundant fossil resources. The real question is not whether gas or coal is clean but whether energy transitions are being designed around physics, economics and development realities, or around ideology.
Climate frameworks often treat cleaner fossil technologies as politically suspect while ignoring the full system costs of renewables: grid expansion, storage, redundancy and backup generation. These costs are real, front-loaded and enormous, but rarely weighed honestly against other transition paths. Developing countries are asked to leapfrog at their own expense while ignoring, for example, the place of gas between coal and renewables. Used wisely, regulated tightly and phased down appropriately, gas can reduce emissions and stabilise fragile power systems.
Western “just energy transition” partnerships have proven slower, smaller and more debt-heavy than promised. This is why Brics-linked capital is strategically relevant, not as an ideological alternative but as a pragmatic complement. Institutions such as the New Development Bank, alongside bilateral finance from China and India, are more comfortable with large-scale infrastructure investment, long-term horizons and energy-security trade-offs.
Brics capital could play a decisive role in funding transmission expansion, grid modernisation, storage and unfashionable transitional generation. Without it, neither public nor private renewables will scale meaningfully, regardless of who finances them.
How long will the present good news last — two or three years, if operational discipline holds? Then risks grow as coal units retire and demand recovers. Securing the future requires treating transmission as national economic infrastructure, accelerating private generation and acknowledging the interim role of fossil fuels. We need diversified transition finance that blends Western climate funds, domestic capital and Brics-backed finance into a coherent strategy.
Eskom deserves credit for stabilising the system. But stability is not sustainability. South Africa has a narrow window to turn operational recovery into structural reform or to discover that today’s respite was merely a pause between crises.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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