Private capital, expanding wheeling arrangements and the growing focus on transmission infrastructure are reshaping South Africa’s energy investment landscape, as the country moves to a more mature phase of renewable-energy development, says renewable energy investment company Revego Fund Managers CIO Ziyaad Sarang.

Revego Fund Managers, which manages the Revego Africa Energy Fund, says the most bankable opportunities in South Africa are now concentrated in operational and late-stage renewable-energy assets where revenue certainty and operational resilience are “at their strongest”.

“From our perspective, the most bankable opportunities are those with robust contractual frameworks, proven technology performance and aligned counterparties,” Sarang says.

He highlights that an important shift in the market has been the rapid maturation of private offtake and wheeling structures, which are widening the investment pool beyond the traditional single-buyer procurement model. These arrangements allow projects to secure corporate offtakers and diversify revenue streams, thereby improving bankability.

Circular Finance

Revego views South Africa’s energy transition as a system-wide challenge rather than a single-technology choice. Its strategy centres on mobilising long-term institutional capital into de-risked renewables assets while supporting grid reliability and flexibility.

Consequently, the Revego Africa Energy Fund’s focus includes wind, solar PV and concentrated solar power (CSP) projects that are already producing electricity or close to commercial operation and its approach involves investing predominantly in operational, utility-scale renewable-energy assets targeting predictable long-term cashflows.

A key element of this approach is deepening the secondary market for renewable-energy assets, which refers to the buying and selling of already operational projects such as wind farms and solar parks or stakes in renewable funds, allowing investors to buy into matured, cash-yielding infrastructure rather than taking on development risks.

“By enabling structured exits from de-risked, operating assets, capital can be redeployed into new projects and that recycling of capital helps accelerate the build-out of new generation capacity,” Sarang explains.

While the fund’s South African portfolio spans multiple technologies, Sarang highlights CSP as particularly relevant to system reliability, as it can incorporate thermal energy storage that enables generation beyond daylight hours. For new projects, battery storage is the way forward; fast to deploy, scalable and essential for flexibility.

A recent milestone for the fund was the commissioning of Project Springbok, a 150 MW solar PV facility in Virginia, Free State, which reached commercial operation in September 2025. The project achieved financial close using multiple private offtakers and wheeling arrangements, thereby demonstrating how corporate procurement can unlock new capacity.

Capital Considerations

Across Revego’s portfolio, Sarang expects three main areas of impact, primarily through additional clean power generation contributing to supply adequacy, increased resilience through technology diversification, and the crowding-in of further capital by proving replicable investment structures.

Private capital, he says, is essential to meeting South Africa’s power infrastructure needs, as public balance sheets alone cannot fund the scale of investment required. He adds that in many African markets, projects stall owing to risks that cannot be structured into bankable forms, not a lack of capital.

Looking ahead, Sarang expects renewable energy to remain the main driver of new generation capacity in South Africa, supported by the continued expansion of private offtake and wheeling arrangements. However, he says the next phase of investment growth will increasingly be shaped by flexibility solutions, including storage, and by the pace of grid expansion.

Transmission infrastructure is emerging as a decisive factor and government has established the Independent Transmission Infrastructure Procurement Programme to enable private sector participation in expanding the network, with a first tranche covering 1 164 km of new 400kV transmission lines. Taking this into consideration, Sarang notes that enabling regulations that took effect in October 2025 are expected to improve certainty for investors.

While renewables will continue to dominate new builds, Sarang says long-term success will depend on solving system constraints, particularly grid access, where private capital is now being actively mobilised.