IN THE SPOTLIGHT: ELECTRICITY REGULATION AMENDMENT BILL

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: ELECTRICITY REGULATION AMENDMENT BILL

• 24 August 2023
• In the Spotlight
• SA Legal Academy

A Bill providing for the establishment, duties, powers and functions of a ‘Transmission System Operator SOC Ltd’ has been formally tabled in Parliament, having been submitted in draft form on 16 August 2023 for internal and planning purposes. Once enacted and operationalised, the Bill will create ‘an open market platform … (for) competitive electricity trading’.

Approved by Cabinet in March 2023, the draft Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill was apparently submitted to Parliament shortly afterwards, although there is no official record of this. According to a Department of Minerals & Energy media statement, ‘on 5 May 2023, Parliament requested the … (department) to re-submit the Bill to the Office of (the) Chief State Law Advisor … for final certification following additional inputs from Operation Vulindlela and National Treasury’.

Parliamentary papers announcing the Bill’s formal introduction note, among other things, that it ‘may only be classified after the expiry of at least three parliamentary working days since introduction’. Yet the Parliamentary Monitoring Group website indicates that the Bill has already been tagged as section 76 legislation affecting the provinces. Clarity is therefore needed, especially because, according to these papers, ‘written views on the classification of the Bill may be submitted to … (Parliament’s) Joint Tagging Mechanism’.

• Bill
• media statement
• parliamentary papers (page 2)

The Bill’s formal introduction in Parliament comes nearly ten years after the sudden and never fully explained demise of an Independent System & Market Operator Bill. Tabled in March 2012, this ill-fated piece of proposed new legislation was eventually withdrawn nearly two years later – possibly prompted by recommendations in a National Assembly Energy Committee report submitted to the House in March 2013 but never formally tabled.

According to Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) records, the Bill was sent back to the committee in November 2013, when members once again adopted its ‘B’ version and the March 2013 report. At the time, concerns were expressed that the NCOP might not have sufficient time to process the Bill before what was then South Africa’s fourth democratic Parliament rose for the 2014 elections.

In October 2019, the DA’s Natasha Mazzone tabled an Independent Electricity Manager Operator Bill, which – a month later – was declared ‘undesirable’ by majority vote during a meeting the National Assembly’s Mineral Resources & Energy Committee.

According to PMG records, ANC representatives in the committee were adamant that ‘many of the Bill’s objectives’ would be met during Eskom’s ‘ongoing’ restructuring and that the Bill would ‘interfere with this process’. In their view, among other things the Bill was ‘inconsistent with government policy regarding state ownership of the transmission grid’.

• 2012 Bill’s ‘B’ version
• National Assembly committee report submitted to the House with the Bill’s ‘B’ version
• DA’s 2019 Bill
• PMG report on DA Bill

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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