The financial impacts of load shedding and renewable energy featured prominently in Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana’s 2024 Budget Speech. South Africa faced a record 332 days of load shedding in 2023, significantly hindering the county’s economic growth and burdening households.
While the adoption of rooftop solar is widely recognised as a means of alleviating the country’s ongoing energy crisis, incentives for solar energy installations by individual households were cut from this year’s budget. Amid broader fiscal constraints, this is an understandable but nonetheless disappointing outcome for South African households, which should be incentivised to make the transition to solar in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and feed-in tariffs.
Government incentives have a crucial role to play in driving solar energy adoption, particularly for households relying on a rent-to-own or a solar subscription model, which cannot afford to purchase solar panels and the necessary accompanying equipment outright.
Despite this, innovative South African companies have an opportunity to continue developing the infrastructure and technology that support a mass transition to renewable energy.