Business intelligence software when power gets quoted

South Africa is moving from a single-buyer electricity system with regulated prices to one where some power is traded rather than tariffed. That changes what you have to know about your own consumption. A regulated tariff is published and you look it up, but a traded price is quoted, and nobody can quote you without knowing how much you use, where, and at what hour.

Business intelligence software in this market is usually sold on dashboards. The reason to have it here is duller and more specific. When the input stops being a table you can read, the only substitute is your own measured demand, and that has to exist somewhere other than a municipal bill.

What is actually moving, and when

The South African Electricity Traders Association has published a six-month update on reform progress, analysed by Krutham. Two documents were gazetted for comment in late August. The Draft Electricity Sector Market Transformation Position Paper was gazetted on 21 August with a 30-day public consultation, which puts its close around 20 September. The revised draft Electricity Pricing Policy was gazetted on 28 August, updating the 2008 policy for Eskom unbundling and the ERA Act.

Of the two, the pricing policy is the one that matters to a cost model. It aims at cost-reflective pricing, and the Department of Electricity and Energy plans to put the final version to Cabinet by the end of the financial year in March 2027.

The dates around the market itself keep moving. Nersa has pushed consultation on bilateral trading rules from August to September, with finalisation now expected at the end of October. The deadline to finalise the SAWEM Market Code has been extended from August to October, and Eskom has threatened a judicial review if certain legal issues are not addressed. Launch to external participants is due in the second quarter of 2027.

None of that is a date you plan a budget around. What it does tell you is the direction, and the direction is that the number you pay for electricity becomes a negotiation somewhere between now and 2028.

Why the municipal bill will not answer the question

The distribution side is where this gets local. SAETA puts outstanding municipal debt at R119 billion.

The municipalities are under their own pressure. ESI Africa reports AMEU president Rob Ferrier saying 2026 will test municipal power utilities on three fronts: new regulation, rooftop solar eating into revenue, and rising infrastructure crime. A utility losing revenue to its own customers' solar is not a utility about to give you a better rate.

Meanwhile your bill arrives monthly, per connection, in rands. It cannot tell you which shift used the power, which line, or which of your three sites is carrying the load. Those are exactly the three questions a supplier will ask, and exactly the three a bill cannot answer.

What business intelligence software has to hold before a quote arrives

Four things, and none of them requires a new platform.

• Kilowatt hours per site per month, for twenty-four months. From the bills you already have. Twenty-four months rather than twelve, because a supplier will want a seasonal shape and one year gives none.
• A load profile per site, even a rough one. Which hours of which days carry the demand. A meter with logging gives this directly; a shift roster and a machine list give a usable approximation.
• Consumption against output. Units produced, jobs completed, pallets shipped, on the same axis as the kilowatt hours. Without this you cannot tell a price rise from a volume rise, which is the mistake that shows up in every energy budget.
• The generator and inverter hours, separately. Diesel burnt during an outage is electricity you bought at a different price, and leaving it out of the model understates what power actually costs you.

The last one is the most commonly missing and the easiest to recover, because somebody is already writing generator hours in a book at the gate.

The seam this exposes

Three of those four numbers live in different places. Bills sit with finance. Output sits with operations. Generator hours sit on the site. Nobody is wrong, and no one of them can produce the answer alone.

Joining a utility bill, a production record and a site logbook so they can be read on one axis is the connecting work Zorah does before recommending any new system. In most cases the data already exists and simply cannot be put in the same sentence.

What to do on Monday

Pull twelve months of electricity bills for your largest site and put kilowatt hours in one column and rands in another. Add a third column for whatever you produce, in whatever unit you actually count.

Then work out kilowatt hours per unit of output, month by month. If it moves around by more than a fifth without an obvious reason, you do not yet have a cost model, you have a bill.

That number is what you will be asked for, and it is also what tells you whether a quoted price is a good one. Keep it where a trend is visible rather than a month. Read it against the shifts that generated the load. Hold the meter and generator records with the rest of your site compliance file so the next person can find them.