City Power is investing R517.8 million in solar microgrids across five Johannesburg informal settlements. Amarasta and Vukani in Alexandra, Shalazile in Denver, The View in Booysens and Vlakfontein in southern Johannesburg are all covered by the approved budgets.

Amarasta and Shalazile are complete and operational, Vlakfontein and Vukani are under construction, and The View is partially complete. Johannesburg has more than 300 informal settlements.

The business case is losses. City Power puts its non-technical losses, meaning illegal connections, meter tampering and unmetered consumption, at roughly R4.5 billion.

Spokesperson Isaac Mangena says legal connections with meters should reduce illegal hookups and improve safety, reliability and revenue collection. The two operational sites tell very different stories. At Shalazile, availability was 100% in both 2024 and 2025, and supply grew from 41,100kWh to 500,086.5kWh. At Amarasta, generation roughly doubled to 133,107.2kWh, but system availability fell from 88.61% to 50.96%, which Mangena attributes to a high number of outages caused by illegal connections.

So the pilot meant to solve illegal connections is being degraded by them. The programme has also narrowed. The city originally planned 21 settlements across 2024/5 and 2025/6, but the budget moved to the Human Settlements Department, and further projects now depend on budget availability and that department's timelines.

Business Day carried Thabo Molelekwa's investigation for the Oxpeckers #PowerTracker programme, which found City Power could not disclose expenditure to date because three projects are incomplete, meaning the R517.8 million is not a final figure and cost per household cannot be calculated.

Frank Spencer of the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association told the investigation that municipal mini-grid budgets cover very different components, some including only generation and storage while others cover reticulation, connections, smart meters, streetlights, fencing, security and civil works, and that municipalities should publish component-level breakdowns so the projects can be compared with conventional electrification.

Strip out the politics, and there is a real procurement pipeline here. The systems are modular and containerised; they need smart metering, and they carry monthly maintenance work orders covering PV modules, inverters, battery storage and energy management systems over an expected 20 to 30-year life.

The city names specialised technical expertise, spare parts and timely maintenance as ongoing challenges, which is a supplier opportunity stated as a problem. But note what cannot be answered. Nobody can say what a connection costs, whether it beats conventional electrification, or what the operating bill looks like in year 15, because the cost breakdown has not been published and the city declined to respond to questions at all.

That is the same visibility problem behind Eskom taking over failing municipal distribution. If you are selling into this market, the useful question is not whether the budget exists. It is whether the operating and maintenance money has been budgeted for beyond the ribbon cutting.

You might also like our piece on Cape Town buying power below Eskom rates, the revised electricity pricing policy reshaping tariffs, and Eskom selling less electricity than it did 20 years ago.

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