War brewing for South Africans with solar panels on their roofs

Eskom has extended its rooftop solar registration deadline, dropped its threats of fines and cutoff for non-registration, and scrapped the requirement for costly professional sign-off. 

But Eskom still says it can cut off supply to any solar or battery installation deemed “unsafe”. OUTA says that the claim will not survive legal scrutiny.

South Africa’s rooftop solar and battery storage owners have a deadline hanging over them: 30 September 2026.

This is the date by which Eskom Distribution says residential low-voltage solar PV and battery energy storage (BES) systems connected behind the meter must be registered. 

It is the second deadline this year, and it will not be the last word in a dispute that has run for months between Eskom and homeowners, installers, and civil society groups.

The dispute is about who has the legal right to regulate what happens on the customer’s side of the meter.

South Africa’s residential solar and battery storage market has grown rapidly on the back of years of load shedding and steeply rising electricity tariffs.

Eskom Distribution itself now concedes that most of the installed base remains unregistered. 

Whether this installed base is treated as a compliance risk to be policed or as a resource to be accommodated has implications well beyond the individual homeowner.

Eskom’s registration and compliance campaign has caused real alarm among hundreds of thousands of South African households that have installed solar PV and battery systems.

These people have done this in response to years of load shedding and steeply rising electricity tariffs. 

Homeowners have faced conflicting, changing and incorrect information about what is required of them, including threats of fines and disconnection for failing to register their systems.

Some have faced efforts to force customers to convert to the new Eskom Homeflex tariff, to sign a new supply contract with Eskom, and to increase their supply deposits with the utility.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has engaged Eskom Distribution repeatedly on the matter and has now set out its position and legal reasoning in a detailed submission to the utility. 

These engagements have produced real movement – but have also exposed where Eskom is now digging in.

Eskom softens its stance

Following engagement with OUTA and other stakeholders, Eskom Distribution has conceded three significant points –

• Eskom has extended its original registration deadline of 31 March 2026 to 30 September 2026.
• Eskom no longer requires a residential solar PV/BES installation to be signed off by a professional registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa. Eskom now accepts a Certificate of Compliance (CoC) issued by a duly qualified installation electrician or electrical contractor registered with the Department of Employment & Labour.
• Eskom has withdrawn its earlier threats to fine and/or cut electricity supply to residential customers who fail to register their installations.

These are meaningful concessions, and they follow sustained pressure from OUTA and other stakeholders rather than a voluntary change of heart by the utility. But a further threat remains.

Eskom has indicated that, deadline or no deadline, it will still cut off supply to a residential customer where it deems the customer’s solar PV/BES installation to be “unsafe”. 

It is OUTA’s view that Eskom would have no lawful right to disconnect a residential customer who holds a valid CoC simply because Eskom deems the installation unsafe. 

Before it could lawfully act, Eskom would first need to prove that the CoC itself was invalid or was unlawfully issued. 

A generalised assertion of “unsafe” is not, in OUTA’s assessment, a legally sufficient basis for cutting off a compliant customer’s electricity supply.

This is not a minor technical point. 

A CoC is a legal instrument, issued under the Electrical Installation Regulations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act by a duly qualified installation electrician or electrical contractor registered with the Labour Department. 

Why OUTA says Eskom’s underlying case does not hold up

Eskom Distribution has routinely justified its registration and compliance regime by citing the Electricity Regulation Act (ERA) and NERSA’s regulatory authority.

It also has pointed to the South African Grid Code, Eskom’s internal technical specifications, network safety, quality-of-supply risk, and the System Operator’s need for data on installed rooftop solar capacity. 

OUTA has examined each of these justifications in detail and rejects them all.

No Point of Connection, no NERSA jurisdiction: A low-voltage residential solar PV/BES system connected to a customer’s distribution board, on the customer’s premises, behind the meter, has no “Point of Connection” as defined in the Grid Code of South Africa. 

A point of connection is the physical node at which a customer’s network connects to the distributor’s network at the outgoing terminals of the meter. 

Without a Point of Connection, a solar PV/BES installation of less than 100 kW falls outside the scope of the ERA and NERSA’s regulatory authority. 

Schedule 2 of the ERA does not require such a system to be registered with NERSA or with the distributor. 

Any reliance on the ERA or NERSA to require registration, or to justify fines or disconnection for failing to register, is, in OUTA’s view, misplaced.

SANS 10142-1 – not Eskom’s own specifications – is the mandatory standard: The applicable legislation for low-voltage electrical installations behind the meter is the OHS Act and its EIR.

This is regulated by the Chief Inspector of the Department of Employment & Labour, not by NERSA. 

The EIR requires compliance with SANS 10142-1, the only mandatory national technical and safety standard for such installations.

The convenor of the working group at the South African Bureau of Standards has confirmed there is no technical or safety “gap” in the standard that would require Eskom’s own NRS specifications to fill. 

Those NRS specifications are voluntary utility documents, prepared by Eskom and municipal distributors for their own purposes, without a public participation process.

They are not national standards, and SANS 10142-1 does not reference them. 

A valid CoC, issued under the EIR, is the only lawful proof of technical and safety compliance for such an installation.

The network safety argument is a red herring: Eskom has cited the risk of back-feed into its network when its personnel work on de-energised lines as a justification for registration. 

But a solar PV/BES inverter that complies with SANS 10142-1 and the South African and international standards and is backed by a valid CoC cannot back-feed the network. 

In any event, standard utility operating procedures for working on de-energised networks protect personnel, regardless of whether a downstream inverter has failed or is non-compliant. 

Eskom’s own accident statistics show that backfeed from unregistered residential solar systems has caused only a negligible number of incidents. 

This is made clearer when compared with a far larger toll of accidents in front of the meter caused by informal and illegally connected networks and connections.

OUTA’s assessment is blunt: Eskom is “barking up the wrong tree”.

Quality-of-supply concerns apply just as much to equipment nobody is asked to register: Eskom also cites quality-of-supply risks set out in the Grid Code as a reason for its registration and compliance requirements. 

A compliant, CoC-certified solar PV/BES system and inverter already addresses these. 

Other household and commercial equipment, such as variable-speed drives, electronic soft starters, and induction motors, can cause the same disturbances, yet Eskom does not require them to be registered separately.

Where a solar installation genuinely causes a quality-of-supply problem, OUTA argues that this can be addressed on a case-by-case basis, just as it is for any other equipment.

The System Operator does not need registration data: Eskom has also argued that it needs registration records so the System Operator can track installed rooftop solar capacity for planning and grid stability purposes. 

But Eskom’s National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA) already publishes this information weekly in its publicly available System Status Reports. 

Eskom, NTCSA, and the System Operator already have far more accurate and reliable sources of information to determine the installed capacity of rooftop solar PV systems in South Africa.

Eskom Distribution itself has acknowledged that the vast majority of low-voltage residential solar PV/BES systems remain unregistered.

This means registration records are, by Eskom’s own admission, an unreliable dataset for the very planning purpose it claims to need them for.

Deadline still stands – for now

At a meeting between OUTA and Eskom Distribution on 2 September 2026, the utility conceded that the vast majority of low-voltage solar PV/BES installations connected to its network remain unregistered. 

Despite this, Eskom insisted that the current 30 September 2026 deadline stands – for now.

That combination – a deadline Eskom itself says has been ignored by most affected customers, defended on grounds that OUTA has methodically dismantled – is, in OUTA’s view, irrational. 

It is OUTA’s position that Eskom Distribution is overstepping its regulatory, safety, and technical authority by imposing burdensome, costly, and largely ineffective registration and compliance requirements on residential customers.

For now, the practical position for residential solar PV/BES owners is this: registration deadlines and threatened penalties have shifted twice in six months.

Three of Eskom’s original threats have been withdrawn, and the fourth – disconnection for “unsafe” installations – is not enforceable against a customer holding a valid CoC without Eskom first successfully challenging that certificate.

Homeowners with a valid CoC and installations that do not export power onto the network are in a materially stronger legal position than Eskom’s public messaging has suggested.

OUTA’s engagement with Eskom on this issue continues, and further concessions – or a legal challenge, should Eskom act on its “unsafe” disconnection threat against a compliant customer – cannot be ruled out.