For more than a century, oil has shaped global mobility – but with an enormous, often invisible cost. Our ancestors once relied on horses fed by hay grown a few steps from home; today we depend on fuel extracted in distant nations, transported across oceans, refined in global supply chains and priced according to geopolitical drama.
For the first time since the internal combustion engine transformed the world, that dependency can be reversed. The energy that moves our vehicles can now be generated from sunlight harvested on our farms, rooftops and open land, produced, priced and controlled locally. This shift marks one of the most important economic turning points of our time.
Electric vehicles powered by renewable energy offer not just cleaner mobility, but genuine independence. Oil has always been volatile. The 1973 Opec embargo triggered a global price surge of over 400%, pushing many countries into recession. The 1990 Gulf War sent prices soaring again, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine caused the steepest fuel spike in modern Europe.
Economists estimate that roughly 40% of US recessions since World War 2 were triggered or worsened by oil shocks. The world has long paid for a fuel it does not control, and the burden has been even harsher in developing economies. Venezuela, once among the world’s richest per capita due to oil, collapsed under corruption and dependence. Nigeria earned billions yet suffers some of the world’s worst poverty rates. The Niger Delta has endured more than 7 000 oil spills since the 1970s, turning one of Africa’s richest ecosystems into a polluted sacrifice zone. Oil built empires but broke nations and communities.
South Africa is no exception. The country imports nearly all its crude oil, spending more than R200-billion/year on fuel that leaves the economy forever. Transport costs rise and fall with Brent crude, leaving households and businesses exposed to crises thousands of kilometres away. The logic is simple: when mobility depends on imported oil, sovereignty is rented rather than owned.
Breaking the chain
Renewable electricity breaks that chain. With advances in solar technology and lithium storage, the energy for mobility can now be generated where it is consumed. A charging station powered by its own solar microgrid is immune to global oil markets and insulated from national grid instability.
This is particularly crucial in South Africa, where the grid’s fragility makes grid-tied EV charging risky. In California and the UK, utilities have already warned that unmanaged EV growth strains existing infrastructure. In South Africa, placing additional load on an already stressed grid is not a viable path. Microgrids solve this by generating clean electricity on site, mirroring the way hay once powered horses with locally produced energy.
Read: Innovation or collapse: South Africa’s dangerous addiction to the past
The real threat is not technological but regulatory. If large state agencies or entrenched interests attempt to monopolise electric vehicle charging, South Africa risks replacing oil dependency with a new form of infrastructure capture. The oil era concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few; the transition to renewables must not replicate that pattern. Sanral and similar institutions must avoid creating gatekeeping systems that mimic the monopolies of the fossil past. The future of mobility must be decentralised, competitive and open – not another terrain for extractive rent-seeking.
South Africans rely heavily on road travel. For many families, road trips dominant form of long-distance movement. When EVs are charged with locally produced renewable energy, the benefits multiply. Tourism becomes more accessible through dependable charging corridors. Households save as electricity costs stabilise and detach from oil volatility. Rural areas gain new economic engines as charging stations create jobs, lease income and local spending. Every kilowatt-hour generated locally replaces a little bit of fuel, and keeps value within South African communities.
Oil’s dark metaphor is not exaggeration. In the words of Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński: “Oil is a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts” – and history agrees. Oil wealth rarely empowers ordinary people; it traps nations in dependency, volatility and exploitation.
Renewable electricity offers the opposite story: stability, local value and resilience. South Africa’s New Energy Vehicle Roadmap warns that without rapid EV adoption, the country risks losing key export markets as Europe ends sales of internal combustion vehicles by 2035. The automotive sector, employing around 500 000 through direct jobs while supporting around a million jobs across the value chain, depends on this transition.
Microgrid-based EV charging is the most reliable and economically rational solution. It bypasses the inflationary risks of grid-tied tariffs and avoids the coal-cost escalations that drive electricity prices higher each year. Most importantly, it keeps the wealth of energy generation inside the country.
We stand at an inflection point where mobility no longer needs to be governed by tanker routes, refinery bottlenecks or political shocks. It can instead become an expression of local energy production and distributed power. The future of transport is not only electric – it is freed from oil’s long shadow. If South Africa resists replicating the monopolies of the past, it can leapfrog into an era of affordability, independence and climate responsibility.
The principle is as old as mobility itself: vehicles should be powered by what is grown or generated around us, not by what is shipped across oceans. With microgrids producing clean electricity at the point of use, EVs can finally be fuelled as mobility was always meant to be: locally, reliably and free from the destructive legacy of oil.
- Joubert Roux is founder and executive chairman of Zero Carbon Charge, a company developing the first national network of off-grid EV charging stations in South Africa
Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here.
