The transmission company's licences are published, and access questions get a new counterparty.

For a mine or a smelter negotiating a grid connection or a wheeling arrangement, the body that answers is no longer a division of the business that also sells it power. South Africa's energy regulator, NERSA, published on its website the three licences needed to operationalise the National Transmission Company South Africa, having approved their transfer from Eskom in the preceding year, in a notice the transmission company dated 2 February 2024.

The transmission company is being set up as an independent subsidiary of Eskom Holdings, under a restructuring begun in 2019 that splits the utility into separate transmission, distribution and generation businesses. The licences were issued under the Electricity Regulation Act as it then stood, and the transfer was presented as consistent with amendments before lawmakers at the time, intended to make the South African electricity market more competitive.

Transmission was separated before distribution and generation by design. An independent transmission, system and market operator was treated as the thing that puts Eskom's own generators and independent power producers on the same footing. On this reading, the licences matter less as paperwork than as the point at which network access, and the running of the wholesale electricity market, stop being decided inside the organisation that owns the generation fleet.

For large power users, a separately licensed transmission, system and market operator changes who you ask about connection capacity and wheeling, and whose answer carries regulatory weight. It is worth checking whether your supply agreement or wheeling arrangement still names the right counterparty for network access, and asking the network operator where your connection sits in its programme. If a wheeled supply is under consideration, the operator's own licensing position is a question to put to the operator rather than to the generator.