James Irons
Provides governance oversight, represents stakeholder interests, and leads engagement with future investors.
About Open Access Energy
Generating, selling or buying renewable energy is only half the equation.
The real challenge is delivering the right energy, to the right customer, at the right time, with measurable value for everyone in the deal.
That's the half we run.
We combine infrastructure, data and commercial intelligence into practical solutions, built around each client.
No more guessing.
We work on every side of the deal, and we're open about it.
Open Access Energy is an energy transactions company, established in 2021. We work with three kinds of customer:
- businesses that buy power,
- traders and generators that sell it, and
- municipalities that carry it on their networks.
A Power Purchase Agreement sets the rules for years. Under it, every settlement period is a transaction: how much of which generator's metered output goes to which buyer, in which time-of-use band, and what that turns into in money paid and received. We help these agreements get made, structure them properly, and run every transaction under them for the full term.
Our Utility Concierge Service is the team that does this work. Bring us the problem, and we take it from there.
Meet the Utility Concierge Service →You'll know exactly who you're dealing with.
A small team of energy experts that stays with your deal, from the first conversation to the last day of the contract.
Directors
James Irons
Gerjo Hoffman
Tenbite Ermias
Melvyn Lubega
Director
Leadership
Timo King
Leo Redelinghuys
Deon Heunis
Gerard Parker
Team
Christoff Albertyn
Jared Sprong
Bianca Rossouw
Sanja Heunis
Jacques Millard
Gareth Hinde
Laura Thomas
Shance Coetzee
Energy Analyst
Rasool Booley
QA Engineer
How we work.
Execute together.
We do the work with you, not at you.
Extreme ownership.
If it's ours to fix, we fix it. No handing you off.
Open and honest.
You'll hear the bad news as early as the good.
Ask why.
We question every number, including our own.
If it's not hard, it's not the work.
Signing an energy deal is the easy part. We stay for the hard part.
Independent and neutral, and open about who we work with.
- We own no generation.
- We take no trading position.
- We have no preferred suppliers.
Every supplier competes on the same terms, and none of them can pay for a better position.
You pay us, so we work for you, and if we also work with anyone on the other side of your deal, you'll know before you sign.
Every supplier is pre-qualified for regulatory compliance, technical capability and financial standing.
Open Access Energy
Private energy should be visible to the people who pay for it.
The New Rules of Power
South Africa's electricity market is open. What that changes, what it does not, and where we stand in it.
Read the manifestoClose the manifesto
For a hundred years there was one door, and it was locked.
If you needed power, you bought from one place. If you made power, you sold to one place. Two sides of the same market, kept apart by the same lock.
Now it is open. South African businesses can now choose where their electricity comes from. IPPs and energy traders can choose who they sell to. Most on both sides are still acting like they can't.
That's the good news.
The other news is that an open market is not a safe market.
An open door lets everything in. The real projects and the sales pitches. The credit-backed and the cowboys. The contracts that hold for their full term and the ones that start eating you from year three. All of it arriving in the same inbox, all of it looking the same. A buyer cannot tell which is which. Neither can a good seller tell why they keep losing to a worse one.
The money you could save has always been there, sitting inside a bill you were never allowed to question. Finding it was never the problem. Getting to it was.
So somebody has to run these deals. Not sell them. Run them.
Check who is real before an introduction is ever made. Put every offer into the same shape so it can be honestly compared, which the good ones have always wanted. Model what it truly costs once the network charges, the losses and the municipal charges are in. Get it past the board, the bank and the lawyers.
Then stay. The signature is one day. The contract runs for years, and every month of it somebody has to know what the plant produced, what you actually used, and who carries the gap. Get that wrong without anyone noticing and you lose more than you ever saved. Clause by clause and invoice by invoice, against a contract most people sign once and never open again. Not on our watch.
You see, nobody buys their way in.
When we run your buying process, no IPP or trader pays us to put their offer in front of you. No placement fee, no commission from suppliers, no hidden cut. Some generators and traders use our services too. When one of them is in your process, we tell you, and their offer is judged on exactly the same basis as everyone else's. The best offer wins, or the process is worth nothing to anybody.
That is not a claim about our character. It is how the company is built. It is also the reason a serious IPP or trader competes here at all.
Open Access Energy
The energy transactions company
We did not open this market and we will not pretend we did. We built the system its deals run on, and we are still standing there on the last day of every one of them.
The rules of power have changed.
The market is open. Come in.