South Africa's transmission business begins operating as a separately licensed company.

A generator waiting on a grid connection in South Africa now deals with a separately licensed company rather than a division of Eskom. The National Transmission Company South Africa was formally launched on 7 October 2024, and the company issued its own statement marking the day.

The licensing came first. NERSA, the energy regulator, approved the transfer of three licences from Eskom to the new company and then published them, which is what allows it to operate in its own name. Its first board was appointed on 9 January 2024.

What the company carries matters more to a holder of a power purchase agreement than the launch itself. It runs the grid in real time as system operator and holds the network as transmission service provider, and it also carries the market side: the wholesale market code, and the work to stand up SAWEM, the wholesale electricity market for South Africa.

The implication is that the office deciding connection terms and dispatch no longer sits inside the business whose own plant competes for that dispatch, and that the licence conditions attached to those functions now bind a company answerable for them separately from Eskom.

For an asset owner, the structural change is settled; the pricing consequences are not. Connection terms, curtailment treatment and the settlement rules of a wholesale market all now flow from documents this company publishes rather than from practice inside the former single utility. On this reading, the papers worth reading are the ones that follow the launch, not the launch itself.