South Africa may be able to raise as much as R1.13-trillion over the next five years to fund a switch to green energy from fossil fuels, the environment minister said.

The amount is still short of the R1.5-trillion the country has estimated it will need for the task, Barbara Creecy said in a response to a parliamentary question posted on a government website.

“This will need to be mobilised from various public and private sources such as multilateral development banks, international partner countries, private investors, philanthropies and the fiscus,” she said.

South Africa is the world’s 14th biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gases. In 2021, it won an US$8.5-billion pledge from some of the world’s richest nations to help the country transition away from the use of coal, which is used to generate more than 80% of South Africa’s electricity.

Read: How South Africa botched its first coal power-plant transition

Most of the finance is expected to come from private investors, Creecy said in her response. The government has eased regulations to allow businesses to generate their own electricity as state-owned Eskom doesn’t have the money to expand and regular breakdowns of its poorly maintained plants subject the country to frequent blackouts. — (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP