South Africa's onshore wind resource averages load factors of 0.36 across its feasible areas, higher than the fleets Germany and Spain actually operate. There are 3.9GW installed across 42 wind farms and 1,487 turbines, with more than 3.6GW operational.

In bid window five, this onshore wind power was procured at R0.49 per kWh, the cheapest electricity ever contracted in this country. The thing is that SA already had way more onshore GWs planned; it just never executed them because the grid wasn't ready, and now the World Bank has published a new offshore framework claiming SA could and should invest in offshore wind production.

The Strategic Framework for Offshore Wind Development, produced by the World Bank with government and launched at the African Green Hydrogen Summit in Cape Town, identifies about 95GW of offshore potential in South African waters, most of it in areas with wind speeds above 9 metres per second.

The largest single block, 64GW, sits between Saldanha and Port Nolloth, and the report argues Saldanha Bay's existing Special Economic Zone for oil and gas rig repairs gives the country a base to build from. It projects more than 300,000 full-time equivalent job years and $6.7-billion in wages by 2050, about R109-billion. Deputy Minister of Electricity and Energy Alexandra Abrahams says the framework establishes market parameters, spatial clarity and regulatory certainty.

But note the timelines inside it. Fixed offshore near Saldanha and Gqeberha could support a proof-of-concept development up to 2040. Large-scale floating projects, which is where the 95GW actually sits, only become operational after 2040. First commissioning is 2035 at the earliest, and only if the government completes a list of priority actions over the next five years.

So the question is, why would you wait decades to build new capability that will produce offshore power at R1-2+ per kWh, when you couldn't execute the onshore that produced at just R0.49 per kWh?

Moneyweb's Antoinette Slabbert reported the framework, including the finding that Cape Town's 6.4GW of offshore potential dwarfs its 2GW peak demand and that Durban's 17.4GW sits against a 1.7GW peak. A Fraunhofer IWES resource study for the CSIR put the average load factor at 0.36 and noted that countries with much larger installed fleets, Germany and Spain among them, run significantly lower. The CSIR's utility-scale generation statistics track the operational fleet, which reached 3,807MW of REIPPPP wind by June 2025. A 2025 turbine dataset published in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information counts the 1,487 turbines and 42 farms currently on the ground.

Take the offshore numbers seriously, and the comparison still does not work. Onshore wind here is genuinely world-class, with load factors most countries would envy and a procurement price of R0.49 per kWh. The 2025 Integrated Resource Plan wants installed wind to grow from roughly 4GW today to 34GW by 2039.

The reason SA hasn't rolled out all that onshore yet is delayed by grid constraints and transmission bottlenecks, which is why the private market has delivered 5.8GW in two and a half years while the state programme managed 9GW in fifteen. So the honest question is why the effort goes into a 95GW offshore resource that needs seabed leasing laws nobody has written, arrives in 2035 at best, and costs between R1.59 and R2.13 per kWh, when the onshore resource performs at a fifth of that price and is sitting behind a transmission queue.

Should the thinking be: build the grid and the wind problem solves itself?

You might also like our piece on the offshore wind framework pitched at data centres, Eskom selling less electricity than it did 20 years ago, and Cape Town buying power below Eskom rates.

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