New data assesses Cape Town’s energy security; efforts to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions
The State of Energy and Carbon (SOEC) 2025 report shows the key trends that have shaped Cape Town’s energy landscape between 2014 and 2023, a period defined by load-shedding and the Covid-19 pandemic. The data and the insights provided in the report are key to ensuring a resilient energy system for all our residents.
The City has produced a SOEC report every five years since 2003, providing residents, industries, and potential investors with an evidence base for energy and climate planning on the back of emerging trends, complex realities and opportunities related to our metro’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The latest data comes at a time when Cape Town’s electricity utility is facing profound financial, operational, and structural changes.
Reliable, affordable and sustainable energy underpins inclusive economic growth. Yet energy use and economic activity also generates Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and waste, which could undermine long-term progress if not managed properly.
The 2050 Energy Strategy for Cape Town’s Shared Energy Future, adopted in 2023, captures the City’s strategic objectives for the coming decades. The SOEC 2025 Supplementary Report analyses the key trends, focusing on the period between 2014 and 2023, to assess baseline progress towards the vision of the 2050 Energy Strategy.
The SOEC identifies five interconnected trends that materially shape outcomes in Cape Town’s energy system. These include:
- Despite rapid urbanisation, the per capita demand for all forms of energy has dropped. This is partly from technological and structural economic changes, but also suppressed demand due to a low-growth economic environment nationally and rapidly rising Eskom pricing.
- This trend along with steady greening of electricity supply has helped GHG emissions to drop in line with Cape Town’s voluntary decarbonisation commitment, but targets accelerate markedly after 2030 posing a future decarbonisation challenge.
- In terms of petroleum fuels, transport remains the biggest demand-driver in general and cost component, specifically for the lower income groupings. Load-shedding not only profoundly changed the energy landscape, it drove up the fuel buffering practices across customer bases, from businesses to households.
The launch of the report is the final activation in the City’s Future Energy Festival that has been driving awareness of Our Shared Energy Future as part of the 2050 Energy Strategy. Click Future Energy Festival, for more information.
The State of Energy section of the report:
The data illustrate how declining electricity sales, efficiency gains and small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) uptake are reshaping a capital‑intensive wires business and complicated cross-subsidy models. This combines with the need to adapt to new customers and new services such as wheeling, and diversified supply options, including an imminent wholesale market for electricity.
The State of Carbon section of the report:
Informs Cape Town’s transition to decentralised, carbon-neutral energy. It tracks the sources of GHG emissions in detail, including, in this edition, expanding the scope to agriculture and land use and industrial processes, and our progress on mitigating these emissions within Cape Town’s broader energy, infrastructure, and natural systems.
Together, these insights support sound decision-making on energy utility reform, climate mitigation and investment.
‘This report reinforces the City’s proactive and data-led approach in reflecting strong interconnections within key urban systems. It shows how energy insecurity impacts mobility and economic activity, how infrastructure reliability is essential to maintaining public trust and confidence, and how cost pressures are linked to tariffs, housing and transport. This is why the SOEC is important: it provides an integrated picture of how these pressures connect to energy use, emissions, infrastructure dependency and urban resilience.
‘The City does not view the energy and carbon transition as a narrow environmental issue. It is aligned with Cape Town’s broader sustainability and resilience strategies, which are not only about responding to crises, but are also about building systems that can adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Whether we are considering climate impacts, energy disruptions, economic shocks, or resource constraints, this report guides us to think holistically and act proactively.
‘We are incredibly proud of the work that has been done. Cape Town is once again showing it is on the cutting edge of evidence-based, data-rich governance to help inform the strategies that build and strengthen our future-fit City of Hope for all,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Energy, Alderman Xanthea Limberg.
To read the main report and the supplemental report, which links the data and trends to the goals outlined in our Energy Strategy, visit www.capetown.gov.za/SOEC
The raw data used in the report is also available on the City’s Open Data Portal.
