Cape Town has wheeled renewable electricity across multiple buildings simultaneously for the first time, in a pooled arrangement that its architects say solves one of the biggest commercial obstacles to scaling private power deals.

Energy trader Etana Energy, Growthpoint Properties and the City of Cape Town said on Monday that the first pooled allocation under the new model was completed in April. Electricity from the 4.5MW Boston Hydroelectric Plant near Clarens in the Free State, co-owned by Serengeti Energy and Growthpoint and operated by Serengeti, is wheeled across Eskom’s network to Cape Town’s municipal grid and then allocated across a portfolio of five Growthpoint buildings.

Those buildings are the recently refurbished 36 Hans Strijdom on the foreshore, occupied by asset manager Ninety One and now fully powered by renewable electricity through the pool; Constantia Village Mall; Centennial Place in Century City; Montclare Place in Claremont; and Newlands on Main.

Pooled wheeling differs from conventional site-by-site wheeling in that it matches supply and demand across a portfolio of customers rather than tying a single generator to a single offtaker. Etana acts as the licensed trader and single point of accountability, settling variable electricity charges across the portfolio. That simplifies billing for the municipality and reduces the supply-demand matching risk that has made single-site power purchase agreements cumbersome for businesses with multiple properties.

Etana CEO Evan Rice said the model was both sustainable and scalable, and addressed what has been one of the most contentious questions in the wheeling debate: whether municipalities lose revenue when corporate customers procure power directly from independent producers.

Pooled wheeling

“Pooled wheeling doesn’t bypass any of the municipal use-of-system charges, therefore it’s cashflow neutral for the municipality,” Rice told TechCentral. “The wheeling credit they receive from Eskom – their avoided cost – is simply passed on to the customer. This principle is essential to ensure scalability.”

Municipal resistance has been a structural brake on private renewable procurement, with several metros concerned about losing electricity margin as large industrial and commercial customers exit. If pooled wheeling can be presented as revenue-neutral rather than revenue-eroding, a key political obstacle to broader roll-out falls away.

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Rice said Etana is already wheeling renewable electricity in Nelson Mandela Bay, and that other municipalities are putting wheeling tariffs and policies in place. The remaining constraint, he said, is municipal IT systems capable of managing reconciliation and billing for wheeled volumes – a problem the pooled model is designed to simplify.

He declined to quantify the saving Growthpoint achieves under the arrangement, citing commercial sensitivity, but confirmed there was a saving after all charges, including those related to wheeling.

Growthpoint SA CEO Estienne de Klerk said the listed REIT (real estate investment trust) had invested more than R1-billion in solar energy and had begun delivering wheeled hydroelectricity to several of its buildings in October 2025. Growthpoint plans to expand the Cape Town pool to more than 30 of its properties – a mix of retail, logistics, industrial, office, healthcare and student accommodation – in the coming months. The V&A Waterfront is also lined up to draw from the pool.

“What makes this different is scale and simplicity. By matching renewable electricity supply across a portfolio of buildings rather than property by property, we can deliver clean electricity for our tenants more flexibly, more efficiently and at a competitive price,” De Klerk said.

City of Cape Town mayoral committee member for energy Xanthea Limberg said the facility was a “decisive leap” in advancing the metro’s energy strategy and reinforced its position as South Africa’s leading metropolitan in the just energy transition.

The Boston plant is the first of several generation facilities Etana plans to feed into the Cape Town pool. The trader has more than 500MW of wind and solar capacity in construction and a further pipeline of grid-connectable projects.

On the absence of an independent transmission system operator – a long-running structural reform demand – Rice said this was not a major impediment to wheeling growth. “There are already gigawatts of new capacity in operation and construction based on wheeled energy. Enabling municipal customers to access wheeled energy will support the continuation of this trend.” — © 2026 NewsCentral Media