Authors: Charlotte Lemanski, Christina Culwick Fatti and Fiona Anciano
In recent years, South Africa has experienced a rapid boom in private solar investments – whereby households and businesses with the financial capacity have installed solar photovoltaics (PVs) at an unprecedented pace and scale. Ostensibly, this is a reaction to persistent loadshedding (scheduled power cuts), exploding electricity tariffs, and recent tax incentives for alternative energy. While shifts away from coal-based electricity generation towards renewable energy sources fulfil global sustainability agendas, those benefiting from South Africa’s energy transition are overwhelmingly privileged stakeholders, thus perpetuating rather than challenging structural injustices.
In 2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the term “adaptation apartheid” to describe how wealthy individuals and countries protect themselves from climate change impacts via infrastructure technology investments unavailable to poorer counterparts. Recently, this term has evolved into broader ‘climate apartheid’, which recognises how climate action by privileged individuals and groups can (re)produce injustice. Despite the lexicon having its origins in South Africa, the term ‘climate apartheid’ is rarely used to examine the justice impacts of climate action in the country. We use the example of private solar investments to explore the utility of climate apartheid discourse in South Africa, recognising that attempts to reappropriate the apartheid lexicon beyond its historical context can be fiercely contested.
We are part of a larger group of researchers examining the justice implications of urban sustainability transitions in South Africa. The ‘Off-grid Cities: Elite Infrastructure Secession and Social Justice’ project, with NRF funding from 2021-2023, explored the social justice consequences of private off-grid infrastructure. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from diverse stakeholders including government officials, private sector stakeholders, and middle-class South African households many of whom had invested in household-scale renewable energy solar PV systems.
South Africa has received significant global support for its national energy transition (e.g. Just Energy Transitional Partnership, JETP). Meanwhile, the public electricity utility (Eskom) has struggled to meet domestic energy demand, leading to a national state of disaster in 2023. Loadshedding (scheduled power cuts) has affected the country since 2007, with the impact most severe (almost daily) in 2022-23. Consequently, the state has invested significant public funds in the private renewable energy sector, incentivising both utility- and small-scale developments.
The Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP) was launched in 2011 to incentivise businesses to develop large renewable energy projects and sell electricity to the national grid. There have also been a series of temporary tax incentives to support renewable energy investments (e.g. Section 12J and Section 12BA of the Income-Tax Act). In early 2023, further tax incentives were introduced to boost solar installation by private households, allowing individuals to claim a rebate of 25% of the cost of new and unused solar PV panels, up to a maximum of R15,000.
In response to loadshedding and these incentives, South Africa has seen a surge in private solar PV investments. In the first quarter of 2023, South Africa imported approximately USD200 million in solar panels, and investments in the first half of 2023 surpassed the registered generation capacity for 2022 (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Growth in South Africa’s installed private solar capacity 2020-2024. Data source: Fitzgerald et al. 2025 (link)
The adoption of household-scale solar PV is uneven, with wealthy households disproportionately accessing solar (and associated incentives) compared to poor households. Recent GCRO Quality of Life survey data suggest that one in four Gauteng households with monthly income above R51 000, have access to solar PV (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Trends in solar electricity access among Gauteng households, by household income level (2015/16-2023/24). GBP1 = ZAR23,60. Data source: GCRO 2016, 2021, 2024
As low-income households cannot depend on solar PV, they are disproportionately affected by loadshedding and rising electricity tariffs. While these households potentially benefit from South Africa’s Free Basic Energy (FBE) subsidy, because this is financed by cross-subsidising the electricity tariffs of high-demand consumers, reduced grid reliance amongst high-energy users directly undermines municipalities’ expected revenue streams. While this has not yet affected FBE subsidy provision per se, the CoJ confirmed that it has “crippled the municipality’s capacity to extend and maintain infrastructure networks for those households and settlements that rely on heavily subsidised services” (City Power official, 2023).
Our research demonstrates that while there is sensitivity by some privileged households to the impacts of their climate actions on state finances (rather than on sustaining a structurally unjust socio-economic system per se), most privileged stakeholders are primarily motivated by securing their own energy needs. As secondary motivations, households perceive that their adoption of renewable energy benefits South Africa’s environment (by reducing reliance on fossil fuels), energy availability (by reducing demand on an overburdened energy utility) and the economy (by supporting the renewable energy sector and increasing energy availability).
Although solar investments contribute to South Africa’s declining carbon emissions, mitigate loadshedding, and create jobs in the context of high unemployment and economic stagnation, they also reflect and reproduce structural injustices. Fundamentally, via ‘green’ private investments, the wealthy have directly protected themselves from loadshedding and benefited from tax incentives that are inaccessible to poorer households, a process which has indirectly undermined state capacity to deliver affordable and reliable energy to the poor.
The combination of privileged populations leveraging climate action to securitise their personal futures (financial, lifestyle), alongside these actions contributing (potentially unwittingly and indirectly) to a worsening of climate precarity and living standards for the poor, arguably renders the adoption of private solar PV by wealthy households in South Africa a form of climate apartheid. Climate apartheid differs from racial apartheid as there is less explicit support by the privileged for unequal treatment of different groups, however, in practice unequal social and economic outcomes transpire. While the lexicon of climate apartheid is largely avoided in South Africa’s popular and political discourse, it is hardly surprising that the legacies of a political system that institutionalised racial capitalism facilitate a contemporary structure in which exclusionary actions are justified through environmental discourse.
While we argue that the term has validity in South Africa, and offers an important and powerful lens to trigger critical reflection, we are reluctant to deploy climate apartheid discourse at the granular scale. Instead, we propose ‘justice trade-offs’ as a phrase that avoids attributing blame or assuming impacts are intentional. While acknowledging that climate apartheid scholarship is careful not to explicitly blame climate-privileged groups for the unjust impacts of their actions, the language of apartheid (particularly in South Africa) risks vilifying those who have significant potential to contribute to equitable sustainable transitions. That is not to absolve privileged households from their responsibilities as beneficiaries of racist capitalist structures, but rather, to emphasise that other actors, such as the state (at all scales), arguably have a greater capacity to mitigate these privileges and balance trade-offs.
