Zambia's regulator sets out how a net metering price will be decided.

A large power user in Zambia that generates part of its own electricity now has a published route for how the credit on the units it exports will be priced. The Energy Regulation Board issued a document headed "Net Metering Pricing Framework" on 16 October 2026, setting out the principles, the methodology and the approval steps it will use for net metering prices.

The framework is addressed to licensees, and the work it says it does is to show them what information the Board requires before it can determine net metering reference tariffs.

Net metering is the arrangement under which a site that produces its own power and pushes a surplus on to the grid is credited for that surplus against the electricity it draws. Read together, those two features turn the value of exported self generation into a tariff determination with declared inputs and a known filing path, rather than a figure argued case by case.

What the framework does not do is name a price. The implication is that the price path for exported units in Zambia will be arrived at through the same kind of regulated reasoning that produces an electricity tariff, with cost of supply and the Board's approval standing between a project's business case and the number it eventually earns.

For large power users, the question is no longer whether exported units carry a value but how that value gets worked out and who has to file for it. It is worth asking whether your site falls inside the licensee category the framework addresses, and what the regulator expects to see before it will approve a reference tariff. If a self generation project is already in design, the pricing route behind its export revenue is now a document to read rather than an assumption to carry.