Load shedding or price rises: which one pays for your solar now?

Price rises pay for most home solar systems now. Load shedding fell sharply after 2024, while NERSA approved +12.74% for Eskom direct customers in 2025/26. A system sold as backup in 2023 has to stand on bill savings in 2026, and for most daytime-heavy homes it does.

The backup case got weaker. The savings case got stronger.

In 2023 a battery earned its keep every week. Outages were frequent, long and hard to plan around. Price the spoiled food, the missed work and the dead alarm system, and the battery paid for itself before you counted a single saved unit.

That arithmetic has flipped. National rolling blackouts are far less common than in the 2022 to 2023 buying wave. Local faults still happen; they are a different problem and a smaller one. A 2026 quote that still leads with Stage 6 should be asked for its savings sum separately.

What the tariff does to one real bill

A R2,500 monthly bill at R3.35 per kWh is about 746 kWh. A 5 kW system with a battery replaces about R1,837 of purchases in year one. Let the tariff rise 8% a year and the same panels replace more money each year without producing one extra unit:

• No tariff rise at all: payback stretches by roughly a year on a mid-priced 5 kW system.
• An 8% yearly rise: payback of about 5 to 7 years with a battery, per the calculator.
• Another double-digit rise: payback shortens. Household cash still takes the hit first.

So should you drop the battery?

Not on this argument alone. The battery now does a different job: it moves midday solar into the evening peak, lifting self-use from about 65% to about 85% in this model, and it still covers local outages. Price it as a self-use tool first. The battery guide works through that choice.