South Africa is thankfully surfacing from a period of prolonged electricity disruption that all but stripped the country of its ability to grow and create jobs for more than a decade. But this prevailing supply stability should not be taken to mean the risks have disappeared. There is a serious investment backlog across the value chain that is being masked by falling demand.

In addition, supply stability is not fully concealing the sustainability pressures.

On the demand side, these stresses are evident in the affordability crisis that is resulting in the closure of electricity-intensive enterprises, high rates of electricity theft, nonpayment of municipal debt to Eskom, and ongoing load reduction in poor areas.

On the supply side, there are a number of new projects being built, but their scale is well below that which is needed. There are also serious grid-access delays for new projects, a stretched physical infrastructure, tussles over the way regulated tariff rules are being applied and increasingly muscular resistance to market reform.

There are changes under way, supported by important adjustments to legislation. Yet, there does not appear to be a joined-up approach to managing these changes, and the gaps are being filled opportunistically.

Such opportunism is facilitated by the fact that South Africa currently does not have a clear grasp of the centrality of electricity to future growth and development. Hence, the country has no clear vision for the electricity industry. Instead, there is an all-of-the-above approach, whereby electricity is viewed as but one component in a larger energy mix.

This is only natural, as the approach is largely being shaped with reference to the past, not the unfolding future. Doubly so given current geopolitical dynamics, desirous of an energy past that, for various reasons, is no longer viable.

Nevertheless, this lack of vision means that South Africa is at risk of missing yet another opportunity – one that is powerfully articulated in new research by global energy think-tank Ember, and titled ‘The Electrotech Revolution’.

At the heart of Ember’s argument is that ‘electricity is the king of energy’; that renewables electricity is replacing fossil electricity; and that electrotech such as solar, wind, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and digital solutions will progressively absorb end-user energy demand, including in transport, heating, buildings and industry.

Ember argues that this shift is driven by physics, which gives electrotech an efficiency advantage over the burning of fossil fuels. By economics, as manufactured technologies such as solar PV get cheaper with scale, while commodities get more expensive to extract. And geopolitics, whereby countries will seek to shore up energy independence by exploiting domestic renewables resources.

For South Africa, there are two other key takeaways. Emerging markets will have the lowest electricity costs, as they mostly lie in the Earth’s ‘sunbelt’. While the economic benefits for end-users of an electrotech such as a solar panel are a hundred times greater than the profits that flow to the manufacturer of that panel.