South Africa faces a dual economic imperative – finding solutions to address the highest unemployment rate in the world, along with the crippling effects of Eskom's rolling power cuts that are hobbling the economy and constraining growth. Investec and its commercial and developmental partners a.
The journey by South Africa’s Pele Energy Group (PEG) from fledgling energy investor to that of a pioneering black-owned and -managed independent power producer (IPP) is receiving fresh impetus from an unexpected source: the robust private-offtake market that has been stimulated by a recent reform allowing for distributed generation projects of any size to proceed without a licence. MD Gqi Raoleka reports that the company has steadily expanded its portfolio from 800 MW in 2016 – when Engineering News ran a feature on how the five young black professionals who founded PEG had aspirations to become a fully-fledged IPP – to approximately 2 000 MW currently.