If you stay at Skukuza, Kruger’s biggest rest camp, this year or next, you won’t see a thing. No new solar fields beside the fence, no wind turbines over the bushveld, no change at the light switch. The power still arrives down the national grid. What differs is where some of it was made.
That matters because the headline version of this story, that South Africa’s largest national park is “kissing Eskom goodbye”, is not quite what happened. Kruger is not going off-grid. According to the announcement coverage, the supply is delivered through the national electricity grid using wheeling, so renewable electricity generated elsewhere in South Africa is allocated to the park. SANParks, the national parks agency, doesn’t have to install large-scale generation in the conservation area. It is a smarter way of buying power, not a way of leaving the grid.
A very large customer with a land problem
Kruger covers 2 million hectares and receives around 1.8 million visitors every year. It is also SANParks’ largest electricity user, accounting for around 70% of the entity’s purchased electricity emissions. Discovery Green’s chief executive, Andre Nepgen, puts the park’s consumption at around 29 million kWh a year, 40% of it from Skukuza.
The obvious fix, building solar and storage inside the park, has two problems. SANParks said generation inside the park would need significant capital and land that is better reserved for conservation. A 2024 UNDP report also noted that, although the agency’s green energy strategy covers Kruger, no budget was specified for the capital spending needed to acquire a renewable solution for the park.
Some on-site solar already exists. The environment department has described an 844.8kWp array at Skukuza that supplies about a quarter of that camp’s daytime electricity demand. That is useful, but it does nothing at night and little for the rest of the park’s scattered camps.
What was actually done
The idea came, by Nepgen’s account, about two years ago as he drove past the park’s Phalaborwa Gate with Discovery Green executive director Dan Ginsberg. The product that grew from it is Ampli Energy. Ampli is a month-to-month renewable energy product launched by Discovery Green in May last year with Sasol, the energy and chemicals company.
The model works through wheeling. Someone else builds and runs the wind or solar farm. The electricity goes onto the grid, and the buyer is credited with it on paper and in the accounts. Nepgen described the aim as giving customers “the same benefits that you’d get if you were to commit to a 20-year wind farm or solar plant”, but on a short-term basis.
The Kruger arrangement is billed as a renewable energy sponsorship. It was announced at Skukuza, Mpumalanga, on 7 October and covers renewable energy equivalent to more than 25% of the park’s annual electricity consumption. A market summary of the announcement says the supply has been running for the past few months. On Nepgen’s 29 million kWh figure, 25% works out at roughly 7 million kWh a year. That is my arithmetic, not a published number.
What the evidence shows so far
This is an announcement, not yet a track record. No measured emissions cut has been published, and the coverage reviewed gives no price for the arrangement. SANParks’ CEO, Hapiloe Sello, said the organisation had been weighing the transition for some time but that the cost of installing renewable generation across its parks was a challenge. In her view, wheeling offered a quicker and more cost-effective way to start.
Discovery Green’s own experience is the argument for the model. The company found that even substantial investment in its own solar installations covered only about 3% of its total electricity demand. Organisations short of capital or land can’t easily generate at scale themselves.
The limits
A quarter is not the whole. The deal also does nothing for the physical resilience of Kruger’s supply, which is a separate problem from where the electrons were made. A June 2026 feasibility study, produced by Malachite Advisory for SANParks with German-backed funding, looked at exactly that. Its director, Ken Ross, said “The challenge is not the quantum of energy that the Kruger uses, but the distributed nature of the infrastructure”. He likened the park’s total demand to two large shopping centres.
The study met SANParks’ target by identifying a pathway for up to 80 per cent renewable energy penetration. It is not a delivered result. One summary of the study stresses that the transition is not yet an 80% achievement and that a further procurement stage would be needed.
Could it travel?
SANParks has 21 parks, and Kruger holds about half of its tourist beds. The agency intends to extend the lessons learned to other national parks across South Africa. Wheeling suits a protected area because it needs no land. It only works where there is a grid connection and a willing generator elsewhere on it, which describes most South African parks but not every remote camp.
The next concrete step is a decision by SANParks on whether to move into the procurement phase for the 80% pathway. KfW, the German development bank, has approved additional support for a potential Phase 2 procurement process, should SANParks elect to proceed. No date for that decision has been announced.
