Electricity and energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa publishes the revised electricity pricing policy for public comment on Friday, 21 August, with a media briefing on Tuesday. Cabinet approved it for consultation on 30 July. It replaces the 2008 framework and aligns pricing with the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act and Eskom's unbundling.

Ramokgopa says the policy will let customers see the true cost of power and move the country toward cost-reflective tariffs, while protecting low-income households and distressed industries.

Read those two goals together, because they pull in opposite directions. Cost-reflective means whoever currently pays below cost starts paying more. The policy sorts customers into large industrial users and the lower and higher middle classes, and it unbundles the bill across generation, transmission, distribution and retail so each line is visible.

Free Basic Electricity is in scope, with the current 50kWh a month possibly rising to 150kWh, funded by fixing what Ramokgopa calls leakage, where Treasury's subsidy reaches municipalities and pays salaries instead. The actual numbers keep climbing regardless.

Eskom direct tariffs rose 8.76% on 1 April and municipal bulk 9.01% on 1 July, well above the 5.36% originally set under MYPD6, after NERSA conceded a R54.7bn error in Eskom's regulated asset base. The policy also arrives nearly five months after the 21 days Ramokgopa promised Parliament in March.

MyBroadband reported the publication date and Ramokgopa's argument that transparency on its own will move prices in the immediate term. Engineering News noted the 8.76% Eskom standard increase exceeded the MYPD6 figure because of the regulator's asset base error. Mining Weekly reported that Cabinet's statement promised protection for strategic economic sectors without naming which ones.

Seeing the breakdown of your bill does not lower it. It tells you who to argue with, which is worth something, but it is not the same thing as cheaper power. The two protected groups here are poor households and strategic sectors nobody has named yet.

If you run a mid-sized business, you are neither; you are the higher middle, and cost-reflective pricing points straight at you. The genuinely useful item is the unbundling, because separating network charges from energy charges is what makes wheeling and third-party supply priceable. That is the door to buying power from someone other than Eskom.

Read the draft on Friday, and comment on the network charges rather than the headline number.

You might also like our piece on the Eskom distribution agency agreements running ahead of NERSA, why South Africa's business regulation beats China's for restrictiveness, and what the surge in South African M&A says about who believes the reform story.

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