Eskom has awarded a contract to Johannesburg-based Enerweb to develop a software platform to support the rollout of its virtual wheeling product, marking the most concrete step to date in operationalising the new wheeling model, says Chris Yelland, MD of EE Business Intelligence.
The contract, awarded in recent weeks, is intended to enable the automation and scaling of virtual wheeling, which Eskom has positioned as a mechanism to allow electricity generated by independent power producers IPPs to be allocated virtually to customers across the national grid, including customers connected at low voltage and those located within municipal distribution networks.
Yelland says the Enerweb appointment represents the first real step towards deploying virtual wheeling at industrial scale following Eskoms earlier proof-of-concept project with Vodacom during 2023 and 2024.
