Lesotho opens its cost of supply numbers before it touches tariffs.

For a generator holding a power purchase agreement in Lesotho, or an industrial buyer paying a published electricity tariff, the arithmetic that will sit under the next round of pricing is now in circulation, and nothing has yet been decided. The Lesotho Electricity and Water Authority ran a two-day consultation in Maseru on 26 and 27 August 2026, with support from the African Development Bank, to put its Cost-of-Service Study findings and the tariff structure it recommends in front of the sector.

A cost of supply study is the ledger beneath a tariff: what it costs to generate, move and deliver a unit of electricity, and which class of customer drives which share of that cost. Where that allocation lands decides whether one group of users has been carrying another. The room was kept deliberately wide, from government and the sector's own institutions through to consumer bodies and academics, and the stated focus was what the findings mean for each category of customer and for the sector's ability to fund itself, with the position of vulnerable consumers singled out.

The regulator presents the exercise as shaping its next steps on tariff reform, weighing what the sector needs to stay solvent against affordability, the quality of supply and protection for customers. It also attaches the work to Mission 300, the African Development Bank and World Bank effort targeting 300 million new electricity connections across the continent by 2030. The authority's mandate itself rests on the "Lesotho Electricity Authority (LEA) Act. No. 12 of 2002 as amended", as its own description of its establishment records.

Two things are worth holding apart. Assessment: this is a consultation, not a tariff determination, so no approved charge has moved and no price path has been committed to. On this reading, though, the cost evidence a regulator consults on is usually the evidence it later determines from, which makes now the cheapest moment to test an allocation that a counterparty disagrees with.