Enerthia Energy works across four areas — energy consultancy, business development, product and service endorsement, and funding. This briefing, from our business development and energy consultancy work, answers one question: when can you choose your electricity supplier in South Africa? The short answer is that it depends on how much power you use. Large users have a stated design and a target year. Households have neither yet.
- South Africa’s market design opens supplier choice to large “eligible customers” first; everyone else stays with their current distributor for now.
- The 1 MW figure in the design paper is an illustration of where a threshold might sit, not a decided number.
- Market opening beyond Eskom is targeted for 2027. Household choice depends on a retail code that has not yet been drafted and carries no date.
- Singapore took 17 years and Great Britain roughly a decade to reach full household choice — both opened to large users first.
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When can you choose your electricity supplier in South Africa?
If you are a large commercial or industrial user, the door is scheduled to open from 2027; if you are a household or small business, there is no date yet. The market design paper gazetted for public comment in August 2026 sets out the sequence plainly. Choice opens first to large users, called eligible customers. Everyone else stays with the retail arm of whichever distributor already serves them, and eligibility widens “over the longer term” under a retail code that, as the gazetted design paper reportedly states, has not been drafted.
The wholesale layer comes first. The South African Wholesale Electricity Market was originally targeted for 1 April 2026 and moved to the third quarter, with launch reported as due by the end of September. The Market Code was submitted to NERSA for approval on 25 February 2026. Monde Bala, chief executive of the National Transmission Company of South Africa, said in March that adjusting the timeline ensures the market is introduced responsibly. Our earlier briefing on planning around the SAWEM launch date covers that wholesale timeline in detail.
Is the 1 MW eligible-customer threshold fixed?
No — the 1 MW figure is an illustration, and the design paper does not commit to it. It appears twice as an example of where a threshold might sit. It does show the scale of customer the first phase has in mind. One megawatt is a business connection: a factory, a mine, a large retail centre or a portfolio of sites. A large home rooftop solar system is typically around 16 kVA, nowhere near it.
If your load sits near that range, the wholesale market is the layer to watch, because it sets the prices eligible customers will contract against. We explained the cost maths for large users in SAWEM is coming: what a wholesale market means for large users.
How long did supplier choice take in other countries?
Everywhere it has been done, supplier choice reached households years after it reached large users — South Africa’s sequence is the normal one. Singapore began opening its market to competition in 2001, starting with larger businesses with higher consumption, and rolled the open electricity market out nationwide from 1 November 2018. That is 17 years from first opening to full household choice.
Great Britain privatised its electricity industry in 1989, opened domestic supply to competition in stages between 1996 and 1999, and reached full national domestic competition by April 1999. Industrial and commercial customers came first there too. In the United States, the Energy Information Administration counts 13 states plus the District of Columbia with active statewide residential retail choice programmes. Texas sits outside that count because choice is mandatory for customers on the grid managed by ERCOT.
What should a business near the threshold do now?
Find out where your own site load sits relative to the threshold under discussion, because that is the door actually opening on a stated timetable. If you are near it, three questions are worth answering before 2027: what your connection and metering would need to change, what your load profile looks like to a supplier, and whether several of your sites could be aggregated into one position.
Our business development team works through those questions with clients and EPCs preparing for the eligible-customer market, and our consultancy team assesses where a client’s load sits against market-design thresholds. And when a project needs capital, we fund it: funding capacity up to R10 billion, backed by a network of 40 renewable energy investment partners, with the best-fit funding model recommended for each requirement.
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