Eskom has confirmed it will not fine residential customers or cut their power for failing to register a rooftop solar system by 30 September. This may sound like the end of a two-year standoff and relief to many South Africans, myself included, yet its not.
The confirmation came from Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena to energy analyst Chris Yelland and the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, and was reported by MyBroadband and BusinessTech last week. Yelland, who advises OUTA on energy policy and runs EE Business Intelligence, has spent months arguing that Eskom never had the authority to issue those fines in the first place.
Anyone who has been panicking about a R30,000 penalty since the notices started circulating can stop panicking about that specific number. However they should not assume the whole thing has gone away, because there’s three separate things here and one of them will cost money on 1 October.
This is the second time Eskom has backed down
The original deadline was 31 March 2026. In February, Eskom’s distribution general manager for the central and east cluster, Kevin Pillay, told The Money Show the utility would hold off on fining unregistered customers and would rather encourage voluntary registration, a position The Citizen and Green Building Africa both reported at the time. The deadline was then pushed to 30 September after uptake came in poorly, and the fine warnings started up again anyway.
So this is a climbdown from a position Eskom had already climbed down from once, which tells you roughly how firm the legal ground underneath it was. Yelland’s argument has been consistent throughout: a system that complies with the Electrical Installation Regulations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act and holds a valid Certificate of Compliance is a legal installation, registering it with Eskom does not make it safer, and non-registration is not among the grounds on which a distributor may disconnect a customer.
Eskom’s counter-argument has been about grid visibility rather than safety, which is a reasonable thing for a system operator to want. Knowing how many gigawatts of rooftop solar and battery storage sit behind the meter across the country is genuinely useful for planning. It is just not the same thing as a legal power to fine somebody.
The trap is that Eskom is probably not your electricity provider
This is the part that’s getting lost in the celebration noise. Eskom’s commitment applies to Eskom Direct customers, meaning households that buy their electricity from Eskom itself. Most people in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini and Cape Town do not. They buy from City Power, from the metro, from a municipal account, and those municipalities set their own small-scale embedded generation rules and their own penalties.
The City of Cape Town is the clearest example and the most aggressive. It treats an unregistered SSEG system as an offence under its Electricity Supply By-Law rather than an administrative oversight, and it charges a service fee of just over R6,400 to remove and reconnect an unauthorised system. Nothing Eskom said last week changes a single line of that.
Municipal penalties reported across the country generally sit in the R6,000 to R30,000 range depending on the metro and the system size, with the higher figures attached to larger installations and repeat non-compliance. Anyone on a municipal account who reads “Eskom won’t fine you” and concludes that they are covered is wrong.
The clock that is still running
Eskom is currently waiving registration and connection fees of up to around R10,000 for household systems up to 50kVA, and that waiver includes the bidirectional smart meter, which is the single most expensive component of the process. Cape Town has a parallel waiver on its roughly R6,000 registration and meter charge for households.
Both expire on 30 September. After that, registering costs what it costs.
That is the actual decision in front of anyone with panels on the roof right now, and it has nothing to do with fines. It is a straightforward question of whether registering for free in the next six weeks is worth more than the option of registering later at full price, or not registering at all. Eskom has also dropped an earlier requirement for certain systems to be signed off by an engineer registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa, which removes one of the more expensive friction points people cited for not bothering.
Three things nobody mentions until it matters
Registration is not the only compliance question attached to a solar installation, and the other two tend to surface at the worst possible moment.
- Insurance. Insurers have become considerably more interested in whether an installation is certified since the load-shedding solar boom. A claim involving fire or electrical damage on a system without a valid Certificate of Compliance is a claim with a problem attached, and this is worth a phone call to your broker regardless of what Eskom does.
- Selling the house. Conveyancing attorneys routinely ask for a CoC covering the solar installation, and an uncertified system has stalled more than a few transfers. Property professionals have been flagging this louder than the fine story all year.
- The tariff switch. Eskom requires grid-tied and hybrid customers to move to its Homeflex time-of-use tariff, which charges different rates at peak, standard and off-peak hours. For some households that is cheaper and for others it is not, and it is a bigger long-term rand question than any once-off registration fee. Prepaid customers cannot stay on prepaid structures under it.
What to do about it
Check which entity actually bills you for electricity before doing anything else, because that single fact determines which set of rules applies. Eskom Direct customers now have no fine risk and six weeks of free registration, which makes the free window the only real question. Municipal customers should check their own metro’s SSEG policy, since Cape Town in particular has not softened anything.
OUTA’s position is that households whose systems are not configured to export power to the grid should hold off registering, on the view that such a system is legal without it. Eskom’s position is that everything should be registered. Those two positions have not been tested in a courtroom, and until they are, this is a judgement call rather than a settled question. None of this is legal advice, and anyone with a large or unusual installation should get their own.
Eskom’s confirmation as disclosed by Chris Yelland of EE Business Intelligence and OUTA, reported by MyBroadband and BusinessTech in August 2026. Earlier February climbdown per The Citizen and Green Building Africa. Registration fee waivers per Eskom and City of Cape Town published terms. Municipal penalty ranges vary by metro and system size, and readers should confirm with their own municipality.
