South Africa will procure 4.6 gigawatts of battery storage and 5 gigawatts of gas-to-power first, pushing wind and solar allocations to a later stage, under new sequencing confirmed by electricity and energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa in a statement on Wednesday. The decision, reported by Reuters from Cape Town on Oct 7, sets the order in which the national build-out reaches procurement and construction.
The ministry, as the implementing agency behind the plan, has positioned storage and gas as the near-term work programme. Renewable generation allocations wait behind them in the pipeline. That order matters for delivery timelines across the country’s power sector.
The framework is last year’s Integrated Resource Plan, a planning document that envisages more than 105 GW of new generation capacity by 2039. Renewable energy accounts for more than half of that total as Africa’s biggest economy gradually reduces its dependence on coal. The plan also made provision for 16 GW of gas in the energy mix by 2039, a figure that gives context to the 5 GW of gas-to-power capacity now entering procurement.
On the storage side, the operational base is modest. South Africa currently has five battery storage projects totalling 513 megawatts. Ramokgopa argued that a bigger uptake of the technology would help make better use of wind and solar resources currently stranded because of a lack of grid capacity. Storage is being treated not only as an addition to the system but as a way of unlocking capacity that has already been built yet cannot be fully delivered to the grid.
Meanwhile, procurement on the gas side is already in motion. The department is evaluating proposals from four short-listed consortia bidding to provide 2 GW of gas-to-power projects. That process will test how quickly the wider 5 GW ambition can be converted into contracted, deliverable capacity.
The statement lays out a delivery sequence rather than a new plan: storage and gas first, wind and solar later, all within the targets set by the Integrated Resource Plan. Further coverage of the minister’s statement is available at https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2026/south-africa-to-prioritise-battery-storage-and-gas-to-power-projects-says-energy-minister.
What follows are the familiar tests of large infrastructure programmes. How fast can the 4.6 GW of storage be procured? Can the four consortia bidding for 2 GW of gas capacity move from evaluation to contract? And how quickly can stranded wind and solar resources be brought into use as storage expands? The ministry has defined the order of work; attention now shifts to execution against that order in the years up to 2039.