South Africa will prioritise an expansion of its BESS and gas-to-power plans in a bid to shore up the country’s creaking power generation sector and avert a potential collapse of the energy market, the government announced on October 7.

The Department of Electricity and Energy (DEE) confirmed the move as part of plans to secure more than 105GW of additional generation capacity over the next decade, the South African Government News Agency reported.

A total of 4.6GW of new BESS capacity is proposed, with a gas-to-power (burning natural gas in gas turbines) allocation of 5GW to complement storage by providing dispatchable electricity when renewable output falls or demand rises.

Allocations for wind and solar power generation capacity are set to follow later.

Prioritisation is needed to deal with an urgent need for storage, flexibility and dispatchable supply in the electricity system — which has to manage surplus electricity and which itself presents a major risk to the system.

The DEE said batteries will help convert surplus generation into usable electricity, while providing rapid balancing and grid support.

“Storage must be located and operated where it can access surplus electricity and discharge without reproducing the network constraint.”

DEE said procurement will be aligned with the charging and discharge requirements of the system operator, “supported by enforceable availability and performance obligations”.

Electricity and energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said: “This intervention is to ensure that we avert the possibility of market failure — undermining our future ambition to procure new generation capacity from the private sector because financing will be very expensive as a result of this curtailment arrangement.

“I’m confident that this presents a new way, a blueprint of how we are addressing an immediate problem. Technology gives us an opportunity to resolve that.”

South Africa has been steadily building the foundations for increasing deployment of BESS over recent years. By June 2025, all five projects in the country’s initial call for battery storage projects had reached commercial close and entered construction, attracting ZAR 15.4 billion ($929 million) in investment.

Under the new proposals, procurement design will address start-up times, ramping capability and minimum operating levels.

The procurement programme will support local manufacturing, engineering, construction, skills development and “broader ownership of energy infrastructure through measurable commitments”.

In 2024, the International Energy Agency reported that capacity shortages and load shedding had plagued South Africa for most of the previous decade, caused by declining availability of its ageing coal fleet.

In June 2025, renewables developer Scatec was named preferred bidder to build a 123MW/492MWh grid-balancing BESS facility in South Africa. Estimated total capex for the Haru BESS, in Free State Province, was ZAR 2.2 billion ($120 million), the lion’s share of which was expected to cover Scatec’s engineering, procurement and construction contracts.