Vodacom said on Wednesday that it has become the first company in South Africa to operationalise virtual wheeling fully in South Africa as it moves to minimise its reliance on Eskom’s coal-fired energy supply.
Built with Sola Group, an independent power producer, the solution allows Vodacom to procure renewable energy for its commercial operations across the national grid. The telecommunications operator said the project provides a “blueprint for other South African companies to follow”.
The teams involved utilised an “agnostic” platform developed by Vodacom subsidiary Mezzanine, with renewable electricity wheeled across the grid from Sola’s solar power plant near Virginia in the Free State.
“Virtual wheeling is a gamechanger for companies like ours with distributed operations, removing longstanding barriers to access renewable energy,” said Vodacom South Africa CEO Sitho Mdlalose in a statement.
The solution built by Mezzanine offers a “replicable road map for other businesses to follow, delivering cost savings, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to grid stability and creating jobs in the energy sector”, Vodacom said.
Virtual wheeling is key to Vodacom Group’s aim of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.
The operator initially partnered with Eskom to develop the virtual wheeling mechanism, which overcomes the limitations of traditional wheeling. Subsequently, Mezzanine created a platform that enabled virtual wheeling and assessed it through a pilot phase. The solution aggregates energy consumption across multiple consumption points through smart metering.
Wheeling platform
The energy consumption data is then reconciled with the energy generated from an independent power producer (IPP) in the virtual wheeling platform to enable companies with complex, distributed, operational footprints to access renewable energy on a scale. It also allows additional renewable capacity to be integrated into the national grid without affecting Eskom’s balance sheet, Vodacom said.
Read: Wheeling: the energy solution that’s been a long time coming
“Traditional wheeling arrangements typically involve a one-to-one relationship between an IPP and an offtaker using the national grid to transport energy. While this is common practice globally, these models have limitations for companies with a distributed network of operations. For Vodacom South Africa, which operates over 15 000 low-voltage sites across 168 municipalities, these geographic and infrastructure complexities had previously prevented access to large-scale renewable energy from IPPs.” — © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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