By Shaune Bouwer, Commercial Engineering Manager at Stage Zero

Upington’s abundant sunshine gives local homes and businesses a strong foundation for solar energy. Our modelling ranks the town among the top-performing South African locations we serve for solar yield, and that natural advantage is becoming increasingly valuable as electricity prices continue to rise and more people look for ways to reduce their reliance on grid-supplied power.

We already have active customers in Upington using Stage Zero solar and battery systems, and we are now expanding our residential, commercial and industrial presence in the town.

Upington gives us a lot of solar energy to work with. That creates real potential for a home or business to generate more of its own electricity from the same-sized system than elsewhere, and reduce how much it needs to buy from the grid.

What Upington’s sunshine can mean for your monthly costs

The local cost case is also becoming harder to ignore. NERSA approved an 8.76% increase in Eskom’s electricity prices, which came into effect in April 2026, with a further 8.83% increase due in April 2027. Those costs flow through to municipalities like Dawid Kruiper that buy their electricity from Eskom. Our solar subscription pricing, by comparison, is expected to increase by around 6% annually, thereby increasing your savings annually.

For customers on our subscription model, the useful number is your total monthly electricity cost after solar is installed. That combines the subscription with whatever electricity you still need to buy from the grid. The model is designed to bring that combined cost below what you were spending before solar, creating a net saving without you having to buy the system upfront.

And if your desired system won’t save you money, we will let you know how we can optimise the system to suit your needs, possibly reducing battery capacity to boost savings. We would rather have that conversation upfront and design a system to suit your exact needs..

A system sized around how you use electricity

The system has to be sized properly for that saving to work. If a customer pays for capacity they cannot use, the economics suffer. We look at how each customer individually uses electricity and specify the system around that demand. It is the same reason your electricity bill does not tell you what size solar system you need on its own.

We provide the solar and battery equipment through a monthly subscription, and we are responsible for the ongoing monitoring and maintenance.

Does your roof need to face north for solar?

North-facing panels are the industry standard in South Africa. In the Southern Hemisphere the sun tracks across the northern sky, so installers generally design around a north-facing roof. As a result, many property owners assume that if their roof faces another direction, solar is not worth considering.

We wanted to understand how much roof direction actually affects solar performance in Upington.

Using Arka360 solar design software, we compared the same reference system across different panel orientations. A south-facing system still produced around 76% of the annual yield of the north-facing benchmark. West-facing panels delivered almost the same annual yield as north, with a north-west configuration performing best in the simulation.

North-facing remains a good rule of thumb. In Upington, though, the numbers show that other orientations can still perform very well. People should be encouraged to consider solar regardless of their roof orientation to maximise savings.

This modelling compares orientation rather than individual customer savings. The financial outcome for your home or business will depend on its electricity use and the system specified for the site. But given the cost of electricity relative to the cost of solar equipment, it is almost always better to have solar than to be without.

Making the most of Upington’s sunshine

We already have customers in Upington using our systems, and we are growing our presence in the town so that homes, businesses and industrial sites here have stronger local support behind them.

If you own a home or run a business in Upington, your property has a particularly strong reason to investigate what it can produce. Upington already has the sunshine, the real work is matching the system to your property and making sure you get useful energy and a lower overall electricity cost from it.

Home or business in Upington?

Whichever way your roof faces, find out what your property could produce. Tell us how you use electricity and we’ll tailor a system around it.