South Africa is undergoing a promising and potentially disruptive, but also highly contested, energy transition. The country’s widely lauded Renewable Energy Independent Power Projects Procurement Programme (REI4P) seems to be gaining new-found momentum after a deeply damaging hiatus of more than 5 years, with new bid windows being launched and a pipeline of procurement opportunities being announced to deal with a worsening electricity supply crisis.

This report is an update of a report published in 2019 (Filipova et al., 2019) on the status of the REI4P, and as such will provide insights into the status and important changes in the programme, as well as reflect more broadly on the likely future direction of the sector and its implications for the auction programme.