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# South Africa has 95 gigawatts of wind off its coast and no legal way to lease the seabed
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/south-africa-offshore-wind-framework-seabed-leasing/
- Published: 2026-09-24T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: A World Bank framework puts the resource at 95 gigawatts, and the first project still cannot be commissioned before 2035.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Policy, Business Bagel News, #trending

South Africa's first proposed offshore wind farm has been stuck for a year. The environmental study for the 800 megawatt Gagasi project off Richards Bay, launched in 2022 by GenesisHexicon, has stalled while the developers supply new technical information. Acer, the consultancy running the assessment, says the authorisation application was withdrawn last year and that it is unsure of the project's status.

That is the ground a new framework has landed on. Published this month, it puts South Africa's technical offshore wind potential at about 95 gigawatts. The Carbon Trust prepared it under contract to the World Bank, with the Department of Electricity and Energy, and Deputy Minister Alexandra Abrahams launched it in Cape Town. Most of it would have to float, because the continental shelf falls away sharply.

## The seabed nobody can lease

The first obstacle the framework names is a legal one. South Africa has no mechanism for granting a developer exclusive rights to an area of ocean: site exclusivity regulations have not been enacted, and the report finds no legislation allowing seabed leasing at all. The framework's second recommendation is that the energy and environment departments settle between them who grants what. Regulatory changes here, it notes, have been known to take two years, before public participation and parliamentary oversight.

Identifying the buyers is the easier part. Cape Town's peak demand is about 2 gigawatts against 6.4 gigawatts of offshore potential, and Durban's about 1.7 against 17.4\. The report points at data centres as the customer large enough to justify building any of it, and of the ports only Saldanha Bay is close to ready, needing little more than extra cranes.

## The price that has to come down

Price is where it stalls. Under every scenario modelled the first project is commissioned in 2035 at the earliest, at $94 to $116 a megawatt hour for the cheapest fixed-foundation sites off Saldanha Bay and Coega, and a little more for the floating turbines that are most of the resource. Onshore wind bought at a government auction in 2021 averaged $32\. The comparison is not like for like, because the offshore figures are modelled for 2035 delivery and onshore tariffs are inflation-linked, and the report concedes offshore wind may not be fully competitive with other renewables on price alone.

The benefit the government keeps quoting belongs to only one of three futures modelled. The biggest puts up 40 gigawatts by 2050, about a quarter of national demand, and only it produces more than 300,000 full-time equivalent job-years and $6.7 billion in wages. Job-years are not jobs, and that total accumulates between 2030 and 2050\. Reaching it means building 2.5 to 3 gigawatts every year through the 2040s.

Energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is careful in the foreword about what the document is not: not a procurement plan, not a policy determination, not a capacity allocation, not a commitment of public money. The 95 gigawatts is a resource rather than a pipeline, and turning one into the other starts with deciding who is allowed to hand out a piece of the sea.