Not a cost center: Energy starts to pay its way in South Africa

If you treat energy as a cost to manage, your thinking is about to become very expensive.

In South Africa, the energy performance certificate (EPC) deadline has come and gone. For many, the focus was on compliance — meeting a regulatory requirement and avoiding fines. But if that’s where the conversation ended for you, you’re missing the point.

EPCs do something far more valuable: They give you a clear, measurable view of how your buildings consume energy. Once you have that, energy stops being a fixed cost and becomes something you can manage, optimize and, increasingly, monetize.

Visibility of energy performance helps you manage it better

To use a simple analogy, think about the energy-rating label on a fridge. The green, amber and red stripes tell you, at a glance, how efficient that appliance is.

EPCs do the same for buildings.

Having a verified baseline for the energy performance of your full property portfolio matters more than the certificate itself, because you can’t optimize what you can’t see. If you only measure, then move on, you’re wasting a huge opportunity.

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Turning energy data into financial leverage

Once you understand your energy baseline, you can start pulling practical levers — and the impact is often immediate:

• Efficiency: In almost every building, there are opportunities to optimize heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, lighting and building management. Tariffs are often misaligned to your actual consumption patterns. Fixing these isn’t complex, but it requires visibility of the data and the ability to act on it.
• Cost: With rising energy tariffs in South Africa, we’re seeing situations where organizations’ energy costs are starting to rival — or even exceed — other major operational expenses. This changes the conversation at board level. Energy is no longer just a facilities issue; it’s also becoming a financial one.
• Sourcing energy: Once you have clarity on consumption, you can start to reconsider where your energy comes from. Maybe you deploy solar behind the meter (on the customer’s side) or enter into power purchase agreements (PPAs) with independent power producers. Through mechanisms such as virtual wheeling, you can consume greener energy while still operating within the existing grid.

This last point is where it starts to get interesting. When you combine efficiency gains, smarter sourcing and incentives from national power utility Eskom and the South African Revenue Service, the business case for transformation can become largely self-funded. We’ve seen projects where the payback period is measured in months, not years.

And then there’s the part many organizations haven’t fully considered yet: energy as a source of revenue.

Energy as a tradable asset

Excess energy — whether generated onsite or contracted through a PPA — doesn’t have to go to waste. It can be monetized. With the right structures in place, you can start generating and trading renewable energy certificates and carbon credits. This means energy becomes a line item on both the cost and revenue sides of the income statement.

And you can produce accurate and auditable reports on Scope 2 emissions (relating to electricity, steam, heat and cooling). This is more than a sustainability exercise — it’s becoming a requirement from boards, investors and, increasingly, regulators.

Real-world results: Reducing energy demand by 50%

None of this is theoretical. We’ve done this with our strategic partner LTM Energy Group at banking group FNB’s campus in Fairlands, Johannesburg, a large-scale facility of close to 90,000m². By taking a holistic view of energy — from HVAC and lighting to onsite generation and operational behavior — FNB reduced their energy demand by about 50%.

What’s more telling is the economics. Key interventions paid for themselves in under six months, with millions in annual savings thereafter.

It’s not just about heavy infrastructure, either. In a separate initiative, FNB took a software-based approach to tackle energy consumption at the desktop level. By managing the power usage of about 8,500 workstations, they achieved savings of roughly 850,000kWh per year, with deployment completed in a matter of days.

This is an important point: Some of the biggest gains come from relatively small, targeted interventions — once you have the data to identify them.

Why this requires an ecosystem

The challenge is that none of this happens in isolation. To move from visibility to value, you’re dealing with a complex ecosystem that includes property portfolios, energy providers, independent power producers, financiers, regulators and internal stakeholders.

You’re also dealing with multiple pathways — efficiency projects, renewable-generation and energy-procurement strategies — that need to come together into a coherent model.

Through our partnership with LTM Energy, we’re able to make the whole process easier for businesses, municipalities and industrial operators — with zero up-front cost.

Our approach is to start with the EPC to establish a clear baseline. We then build out a roadmap that can include efficiency improvements, the integration of renewable energy and participation in broader energy markets.

Underpinning this is a real-time energy marketplace and management platform, the Consolidated Energy Cockpit, which brings together the different players in the ecosystem. It makes energy and asset monitoring, emissions tracking and transactions between energy producers, off-takers and financiers auditable, bankable and verifiable.

Our expertise in digital infrastructure, data platforms and energy optimization — combined with LTM Energy Group’s experience in energy efficiency, renewable deployment and energy services company delivery models in Africa — gives confidence to lenders and partners while enabling you to move faster, with less risk.

What will you do next?

At this point, the EPC deadline is behind us. The compliance conversation will continue, but it’s no longer the most important one. You should be asking: What will we do with the data?

If you treat EPCs as a starting point, you now have an opportunity to fundamentally change how you think about energy. You can reduce costs, improve resilience, meet your sustainability obligations and unlock new sources of value.

Energy has already changed. The question now is whether you’re ready to change with it.

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