Professor Roula Inglesi-Lotz and Dr Jessika Bohlmann’s call for a more coordinated and community-driven energy transition in South Africa is challenged by a deeper structural reality, according to former Acting Group Chief Executive of Eskom Matshela Koko. Writing in response, Koko argues that South Africa’s looming coal plant retirements are driven largely by legal compliance deadlines and infrastructure limitations that better governance alone cannot solve.
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Professor Roula Inglesi-Lotz and Dr Jessika Bohlmann write in these pages that the central question facing South Africa's energy transition is not whether the country is moving fast enough, but whether it is moving together.
It is an elegant reframing, and on the importance of timing, sequencing and community trust, they are right. But the argument contains a silent assumption that requires scrutiny before it can responsibly guide policy — the assumption that better coordination would make the transition feasible.
The evidence suggests it would not. Not on its own.
South Africa's coal retirements are not a policy choice being implemented too quickly. They are, in substantial part, legally imposed. The Minimum Emission Standards compliance deadlines under the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act require 8.4 GW of coal-fired generation to retire by 1 April 2030. The Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment's March 2025 determination substantially closed the flexibilisation window that Eskom had sought. A further 1.15 GW departs with the Cahora Bassa import contract expiry. These are not levers that improved institutional alignment can adjust. They are enforcement deadlines.
At the same time, replacing that capacity requires transmission infrastructure with five-year construction timelines. No amount of stakeholder coordination compresses reinforced concrete into a shorter curing time. The grid either exists or it does not.
This is the structural heart of South Africa's transition challenge — and it is measurable. Research I have developed, currently under peer review, introduces the Cliff Intensity Index (CII): a dimensionless ratio that quantifies the velocity mismatch between retiring baseload capacity and achievable replacement integration. South Africa's CII of 2.16 means retirement velocity currently exceeds what the grid can absorb by 116 per cent. For context, Germany's Energiewende peaked at a CII of 0.27 — integration running nearly four times faster than retirement. South Africa's figure is eight times higher, and sits outside the feasibility frontiers established by Vinichenko and colleagues from 43 historical coal-decline episodes. We are, in their terminology, in Zone B/C: a region where historical precedents are rare to absent.
The critical finding, however, is not the 2.16 headline. It is what happens when you model a scenario of perfect governance — every institutional barrier removed, procurement running flawlessly, regulatory uncertainty eliminated entirely. Under those conditions, the CII falls to 1.80. Retirement velocity still exceeds integration capacity by 80 per cent. The coordination problem, fully solved, does not close the gap. The residual mismatch is structural: it reflects physical infrastructure timelines that governance reform cannot compress.
Inglesi-Lotz and Bohlmann write that when systems are not in sync, 'delays in one area propagate through the system, slowing progress elsewhere and weakening confidence in the transition.' This is accurate. But there is a harder version of the same observation: when the velocity mismatch is structural rather than coordinative, the adequacy deficit is not a governance failure awaiting correction. It is a system characteristic requiring active management.
That management confronts what the research identifies as a trilemma with no clean exit. Accepting adequacy deficits — unserved energy projected to exceed 4 TWh annually in the worst scenarios — breaches constitutional obligations to reliable electricity access and falls disproportionately on households already living with energy poverty. Extending coal operations beyond compliance deadlines would reduce transition velocity, but risks forfeiting the $13.7 billion in Just Energy Transition Partnership financing explicitly conditioned on demonstrable phase-out progress. That is the very funding designed to support the communities in coal-dependent Mpumalanga that a just transition is meant to protect. Deploying natural gas as bridging capacity would reduce the velocity mismatch materially but faces documented procurement and resource infrastructure constraints that cannot be resolved within the relevant window.
Every pathway that reduces the velocity problem activates at least one other vertex of the trilemma. This is categorically different from a synchronisation problem with a solvable equilibrium.
None of this diminishes the value of the coordination argument. Institutional friction demonstrably amplifies the structural challenge — that 2.16 figure includes a measured friction multiplier derived from transmission delivery performance against parliamentary targets. Reducing that friction matters. Participatory processes that build community trust are essential for the political sustainability of whatever pathway is ultimately chosen. On these points, Inglesi-Lotz and Bohlmann are correct and important.
The point is rather one of diagnostic precision. 'Moving together' is a necessary condition for a just transition. It is not a sufficient condition for a feasible one. South Africa needs both the participatory, trust-building approach that the authors prescribe and an honest reckoning with the structural velocity problem that coordination cannot eliminate.
Energy Month 2026 would be well served by the sharper question that follows: given that the velocity mismatch has structural characteristics that policy cannot fully resolve before 2030, what trilemma management strategy minimises harm to the very communities a just transition is designed to protect? That question requires coordination and velocity measurement working together — not as competing frameworks, but as complements. One tells us how to move together. The other tells us whether moving together is enough.
It is not. But knowing that changes what 'together' must accomplish.
*** Matshela Koko is a doctoral candidate at the UNISA Graduate School of Business Leadership and Managing Director of Matshela Energy. His research on the Cliff Intensity Index as a velocity diagnostic for coal-dependent energy transitions is available as an SSRN preprint (https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5794522).
*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of IOL or Independent Media.
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