Charge to switch on first N3 off-grid EV stations in May

Off-grid EV charging company Charge will bring its first two stations on the N3 between Johannesburg and Durban live in mid-May, co-founder and director Joubert Roux said in an upcoming interview on the TechCentral Show, marking the commercial debut of a network the company ultimately plans to extend to 120 sites across South Africa’s national roads.

Civil works at the two sites – Charge N3 Tugela in KwaZulu-Natal and Charge N3 Roadside in the Free State – are within days of completion, with the battery systems due to arrive in Durban this week, Roux said. Charge has already signed a commercial “offtaker” for 50% of the energy the N3 sites will produce, meaning both will be profitable from day one.

That agreement is with electric-fleet logistics aggregator Zimi, which in March locked in a three-year deal giving it reserved charging capacity on the corridor.

The launch follows 15 months of live operation at Charge’s proof-of-concept station in Wolmaransstad, which Roux said had delivered 99.6% uptime on both its chargers and its communications link since going live in late November 2024. He described the site as a technical validation of a setup that, he claims, has not previously been attempted anywhere in the world: a fully off-grid, solar-and-battery charging station designed to modularly expand its solar, storage and dispenser capacity independently as consumer demand patterns become clearer.

Charge – formerly Zero Carbon Charge – argues that off-grid generation is not only a carbon play but a structural necessity for EV adoption in South Africa, where the distribution grid was never designed to absorb sudden large loads at rural interchanges. “The cable going into a dorp that was designed to serve 500 people and five sheep farmers, all of a sudden you’ve got a thousand cars and 100 trucks going past, and they want to charge,” Roux said.

Expansion plans

The stations are sized to break even on a cash basis at three vehicles per day at an average 55kWh charge, and to reach operational profitability at nine a day. Roux said the full planned national network would be profitable at a total South African EV count of just 60 000 vehicles – a threshold he believes is closer than many in the market assume. BYD alone is now selling more EVs in South Africa than the entire market recorded in 2024, he claimed, and he expects the local market to cross 5% of new EV sales next year, a level that has historically proved to be a tipping point in other markets.

Demand on the N3 may force an earlier capacity expansion than planned, Roux added.

Read: Zimi, Charge Holdings partner to electrify freight on N3 corridor

After the N3, Charge will build out the N1 between Cape Town and Musina, followed by the N6 between Bloemfontein and East London. The initial national roll-out will consist of 60 stations at 300km intervals, densifying to 120 stations at 150km intervals.

Charge has secured a R100-million investment from the Development Bank of Southern Africa and is close to finalising a matching private round through tokenisation platform Mesh and London-based African Merchant Capital, Roux said. A public offering is planned for later this year, but not on the JSE – which Roux described as geared to late-stage institutional raises rather than early-stage development capital.

Longer term, Roux sees as many as 630 truck charging stations needed to electrify Africa’s main freight arteries, a build-out he compared to the mobile industry’s leapfrog past fixed-line infrastructure. “I think we are at one of those moments like when the internet became a big thing and cell phones were launched,” he said.

Roux’s full interview will air on an upcoming episode of the TechCentral Show.  – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media