Wheeling, explained
This is what changed, and what it now allows you to do. No jargon, and nothing to sign.
Eskom generated the electricity and sold it to you, or sold it to your municipality, which sold it to you. One supplier, one tariff, one bill, and no alternative to compare it against.
Eskom's national transmission network and your municipality's local lines. Poles, cables and substations carrying electricity from wherever it is made to wherever it is used. That network is the grid, and it has never been the thing you were buying.
Thresholds on private power generation began to lift from 2021. Every plant still has to be registered. You can now contract directly with an independent generator or a trader. They supply it, the same grid still delivers it, and you pay the network owner a charge for that delivery. Buying across the grid this way is called wheeling.
Your connection and your site stay exactly as they are. The one thing worth checking is your metering.
For sites supplied at high or medium voltage. A generator injects electricity onto the network at one point and you draw it at another. There is a route from the plant, across the grid, to your site, and the deal is built around that route. The saving arrives as a credit on your bill, and your supply agreement with Eskom or your municipality is amended.
There is still a route: from the generator, into Eskom's grid, to the meter at your premises. It bypasses the municipality, not the grid. The generator must be connected to Eskom's grid. It injects, you draw, and Eskom nets the two volumes and pays a rebate for the wheeled energy. Your existing supply agreements and bills don't change, and sites on municipal supply can take part too. Nothing is rewired. It also works for sites on low voltage. A business with twenty small outlets, each on low voltage, can't use traditional wheeling, but it can use virtual wheeling.
Coming soon from Eskom. Talk to us if you want to know more.
Which one fits
We do both, so you don't have to choose before you talk to us. The difference is how the saving reaches you. Traditional wheeling shows it as a credit on your bill and needs a high or medium voltage supply. Virtual wheeling leaves your bill unchanged and pays the saving as a rebate, and works on low voltage too.
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. The plant may sit on your property, or elsewhere with the existing grid delivering it.
Offers arrive on different terms, volumes and escalation. Side by side they look comparable. They are not, and the cheapest rate is rarely the best deal.
The contract sets how much power, in which hours, at what price, and what happens when the plant falls short. What was promised in the offer does not always survive into it.
Every month, for the whole term, someone has to work out what was delivered, what was owed and what is charged. Too often nobody checks it against the contract, and value leaks.
The first two are agreed once. The third happens every month, for the life of the agreement. That is where value is most often lost.
A rate on its own tells you very little. The number that matters is what lands on your account once the network charges, the losses and the municipal charges are counted. Two offers with the same rate per kilowatt hour can land very differently, depending on where the plant sits, when it generates, and what your own consumption looks like hour by hour.
This is why we model your load before anyone quotes you anything.
A signed wheeling agreement carries penalties, guarantees and time of use rules for the whole of its term. One workbook can hold one deal. At three it stops working.
The spreadsheet is not wrong. It is that nobody beyond the person who built it can prove it is right.
Eskom's tariffs for industrial users have more than doubled in the past decade. Coal is not leaving. Decommissioning has been deferred repeatedly, and the cost of running an ageing fleet, along with the debt behind it, stays in the tariff you pay.
A wholesale electricity market is on the way, and businesses that are already contracted will be best placed to use it.
That's the basics. If you'd like to know which kind of wheeling fits your sites, talk to a person. If you're the one who has to make it work, read on.
Part two
The rest of this page is the mechanics of virtual wheeling. It is written for the person who will have to make it work.
You register as the buyer on Eskom's platform. We handle the specialist support.
We load your agreements and combine your sites' consumption into one profile. Eskom-supplied data comes direct. Municipal sites need check metering, which we arrange.
We take your load to pre-qualified suppliers through Energypro Marketplace. You sign with the supplier or suppliers you choose.
Each month, energy is allocated across your sites under the rules in your contract, balancing each site's guarantee against the available Eskom rebate.
Once live, we run the same process every month, and a person on our team checks it.
Time of use metering data is collected, validated and submitted to Eskom.
Eskom verifies the data and calculates the rebate.
The rebate is paid for the registered sites.
We reconcile that rebate against your agreements, so energy is neither over-allocated nor under-allocated.
It is better to find that out now than three months in.
We screen every site against these before anything is committed.
The simplest to include. Settlement is direct with Eskom, which keeps reconciliation and billing straightforward and gives the fastest route to a first transaction.
These can participate provided the meter is approved by Eskom for wheeling settlement and the municipality itself is in good standing.
A mixed portfolio works. You do not need to separate your sites by supply authority.
This still works, and it takes longer. Your landlord has to authorise it in writing, and there are legal and metering considerations that come out of the lease itself.
In our experience these authorisations are the longest lead item in the whole process. If a meaningful share of your sites are leased, start there.
A person on our team checks twelve months of bills against your meter and tells you what they find. Free for the first 100 South African businesses.
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