The transmission company starts trading in its own name.

For a generator holding a power purchase agreement, the counterparty that moves its electricity and settles its market position is now a company trading in its own name. The commencement of trade was announced jointly by the National Transmission Company South Africa, Eskom and the Department of Public Enterprises, in a statement published under the heading "Media Statement: NTCSA Commencement of Trade".

The transmission business is a state-owned company in its own right, carrying a registration number of its own, with Eskom Holding named alongside it as a separate entity. Three roles sit under that one roof: the system operator that dispatches the national grid and publishes system status reports, the network service provider that owns and expands the lines through its transmission development plans, and the market services arm that runs the South African Wholesale Electricity Market, or SAWEM, under a published wholesale market code. The same company also holds the international trading role for electricity crossing South Africa's borders, and runs a cross-border standard offer programme for that trade.

Assessment: the change a PPA holder feels first is in who answers for what. Connection, curtailment and wheeling questions now go to a company whose governance, accounts and licences are its own, while generation and distribution remain with Eskom. On this reading, the South African electricity market gains a counterparty whose creditworthiness and charges can be read on their own terms rather than inside a single vertically integrated utility.

The announcement of a start is not the same as the terms of trade. What a generator, an offtaker or a mine buying power still needs to read sits in the documents the company publishes rather than in the statement: the settlement rules in the market code, the arrangements under which new plant is connected, and the conditions on which the wholesale electricity market opens to participants beyond the incumbent. Those documents, not the commencement itself, decide what a position in this market costs to hold.