Members of the energy regulator Nersa questioned Eskom‘s plan to sell discounted daytime electricity to crypto miners at a meeting of the regulator’s electricity sub-committee on 14 September 2026, warning of price discrimination, competition concerns and the risk that other customers could carry the cost. Moneyweb reported the discussion on 17 September.
Nersa is expected to publish a discussion document on the proposal for public comment soon. Eskom wants to run a two-year, location-based pilot that would offer discounted tariffs to crypto miners. The contracts would carry demand-response obligations, meaning the customer agrees to cut or raise its consumption at short notice. Eskom would keep the right to switch off their supply if needed to balance the grid, and it would report on the pilot to Nersa monthly or quarterly.
Why Eskom wants the customers
The proposal stems from a fall in daytime demand as households and businesses with rooftop solar draw less from the grid. Eskom has a midday surplus of between 5 000MW and 7 000MW. The National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA) estimates total rooftop solar capacity at 9 430MW at the end of August 2026, up from 7 463MW in January.
A crypto-mining site runs computers around the clock and uses as much electricity as many large industrial customers. The difference is that it can be shut down and restarted, or ramped up and down, quickly, which manufacturing and mining operations generally cannot. Moneyweb said this could help the system operator through the midday lull and the evening peak, lift Eskom’s falling sales volumes, use power that is currently dumped, and limit the curtailment payments Eskom makes to generators that are ready to supply but must cut output because demand is short.
The idea is not new. In April 2026, TechCentral reported that Eskom’s head of distribution, Agnes Mlambo, said the utility had been talking to bitcoin miners because “their operations allow them to ramp up as and when energy is available”. Eskom chairman Mteto Nyati had told a conference in March that the utility was evaluating selling the midday surplus at discounted rates to flexible users. TechCentral added that Nersa would have to run a public consultation before any pilot could begin.
What the regulator’s members said
Acting chair Ria Govender asked why the project should be limited to crypto miners. She said this could amount to price discrimination, which the law prohibits “except for objectively justifiable and identifiable differences approved by the Regulator”. In her view, qualifying customers would be better defined by load profile, so that any customer offering the same flexibility could get the discount. She added that a discounted tariff would still have to reflect the true cost of supply, and that Nersa would approve any tariff through a separate process.
Muzi Mkhize, the full-time member for petroleum pipelines, asked whether Nersa has the power to approve the proposal at all, given there is no guiding framework like the one the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition drafted for negotiated pricing agreements (NPAs).
Nomfundo Maseti, the full-time member for piped gas, cautioned against looking at tariffs piece by piece because of possible unintended consequences. She asked whether the proposal could fit inside Eskom’s Retail Tariff Plan, which Nersa has approved as the framework for tariff structures. She also said Nersa must weigh the development of a competitive wholesale electricity market, and that the discount could raise market-power concerns once that market starts operating. “It cannot be that Eskom proposes and then Nersa looks at it and only considers the engineering side, without looking at the economic problems that impact consumers and businesses and the functioning of the market,” she said.
The alternative on the table
Tommy Garner, an executive committee member of the South African Independent Power Producer Association (Saippa), said the surplus could be handled by adjusting existing time-of-use tariffs. Lower midday rates would stimulate demand, he said, and the cost of suitable meters has dropped significantly.
Electricity pricing expert Deon Conradie drew a line between this proposal and NPAs for large power users. NPAs respond to financial hardship, he said, while this proposal aims to absorb surplus electricity. He agreed Eskom should use a pricing signal to raise daytime demand and offer it to all customers, since “there are many other customers with the same load profile”, and that tariffs must stay cost-reflective and consistent with the approved Retail Tariff Plan.
An NPA is a discount agreed for a single large customer. Engineering News reported that Nersa approved a two-year NPA between Eskom and the Mbombela-based Manganese Metal Company on 30 July 2026, running from 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2028. The agreement covers only Eskom’s variable costs plus a contribution to fixed costs, and Eskom said standard-tariff customers would not subsidise the shortfall. That deal was justified by hardship and by protecting baseload demand, which is the distinction Conradie drew.
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