08 Jun 2026
ERI Article: Regulatory convergence offers solution to SAPP’s power shortages and ageing transmission
- The SAPP market faces two significant challenges – power shortages and ageing infrastructure, which causes significant losses during transmission.
- The 17 regional energy projects identified by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to accelerate the development of new power sources suffer from a large differential between available funds and actual project delivery cost. SADC has asked member countries to identify key factors behind this gap.
- There is a lack of capacity to wheel power to mines in the Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Copperbelt region and Zimbabwe’s central transmission corridor is now severely aged and needs a complete overhaul.
- Overall, the region needs around $1.8bn to fund the strengthening of the high-voltage transmission lines and the development of specific interconnector projects, but there are major barriers to investment in the region’s ageing transmission infrastructure.
- Many of these problems could be resolved via the introduction of more effective and more harmonized regulatory structures, removing arbitrary differences in the investment environments of neighboring electricity supply industries (ESIs).