South Africa’s power grid is entering a new era. In just a few short years, the grid has taken on distributed energy resources, or DERs, renewable generation and battery storage, and with it, changing consumption patterns.
Rooftop solar alone has expanded from 1000 MW in 2022 to 7300 MW by late 2025 and continues to grow, according to a system dynamics study of rooftop solar photovoltaic adoption in South Africa. Hybrid solar-plus-battery systems have also proven capable of covering up to 99% of curtailed load in optimised scenarios.
It is a promising outlook, but as with most things in life, it comes with a caveat. For decades, power networks were largely designed around a straightforward model. Electricity was generated centrally and flowed in one direction through transmission and distribution networks to the end user. Today, that model is becoming more dynamic, with generation increasingly happening closer to the point of consumption, while consumers themselves are becoming producers of electricity.
The result is a grid that cannot merely deliver electricity but needs to manage power flows in both directions, while maintaining the stability, quality and reliability that customers and communities depend on. This adds a new layer of complexity for network operators. Traditionally, system frequency and voltage have been managed predominantly at transmission level, where large generation assets can be dynamically controlled.
With DERs connecting increasingly at medium- and low-voltage levels, some of these considerations are moving deeper into the distribution network. A DER might connect at medium-voltage level (6,6, 11, 22 or 33 kV), or even at low-voltage levels (below 1000 V) within commercial buildings and homes. At these levels, network conditions can vary considerably.
Industrial facilities, for example, can introduce power quality considerations through motor-driven equipment and other loads, while the addition of inverters, solar generation and batteries introduces further dynamic variables such as harmonic distortion. The challenge is to understand how all these varied elements interact across the network. The grid needs to become more intelligent.
Intelligence activated
Digitalisation adds a much-needed layer of intelligence. It gives utilities greater visibility into what is happening across their networks and the ability to respond dynamically, such as adding DER capacity while gaining real-time insight into how assets are performing.
Distributed energy resource management systems, or DERMS, can be invaluable here, providing the intelligence required to monitor and manage growing volumes of distributed generation. DERMS is a grid-aware platform that provides operators with smarter dispatch, situational awareness, active network management, dynamic capacity conservation and look-ahead flexibility management, all critical for an evolving and increasingly complex grid with rising prosumer participation.
By dynamically calculating DER operating envelopes, DERMS resolves the problem of limited capacity for connecting new DERs. This ensures that each DER’s behaviour does not create new violations or cause grid congestion.
Enter aggregation
The scale and diversity of DERs also require a new approach when managing these new layers of intelligence and implementing the resultant assets. A traditional network is relatively straightforward, including infrastructure such as substations, transformers and ring main units. A modern distribution network, on the other hand, could include thousands of different combinations of solar panels, inverters and batteries, each with different capacities and operating characteristics.
This is where aggregation can play an important role, effectively bringing together multiple smaller distributed assets and presenting them to utilities as a coordinated resource. Instead of managing hundreds or even thousands of individual systems independently, the utility can interact with an aggregated portfolio that can be monitored and managed more efficiently. This is also how DERMS helps build towards active network management, through the adoption of aggregation to achieve economic optimisation.
In turn, it opens an interesting opportunity for businesses already operating in the distributed energy market: they could potentially evolve their role by aggregating the distributed systems they manage.
Schneider Electric’s recently announced partnership with Kraken is an example of aggregation in practice. The partnership aims to equip distribution system operators and utilities with advanced capabilities to monitor the grid, forecast congestion and shift demand in real time, enabling participation in energy markets. In essence, it turns distributed assets into a virtual power plant at scale. For South Africa where rooftop solar and batteries are proliferating, adopting similar aggregation frameworks will improve equity and accelerate electrification without waiting for multi-year grid reinforcement by combining DERs into a coordinated portfolio that behaves like a single large power plant responding to market signals and grid needs.
The grid as it stands needs to become more intelligent and adaptable to accelerate the energy transition. This can be achieved without replacing it, by providing both utilities and consumers with the tools and insight to manage an increasingly dynamic system that enables a resilient and efficient digital grid.
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