Gauteng has more rooftop solar than any other province, 2.25GW, or 27% of South Africa's total, and much more than KwaZulu-Natal's 1.4 GW, the second-highest province.

The gigawatts installed in Gauteng have nearly tripled since 2022, according to data published by Eskom. Rooftop solar covers the solar installations on private households as well as on commercial and industrial buildings like malls.

In Gauteng it’s hard to find a mall without solar panels. We counted the malls to see how many have solar panels on their roofs.

We counted 209 shopping malls in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, and then, using satellite images, we found that 76% of them have rooftop solar. We mapped all the shopping malls, and the distribution of those with solar panels is fairly widespread.

Eastgate Mall has the biggest solar installation. It started small in 2020 and has grown to 7.2MW powered by 13,675 solar panels.

The Mall of Africa also has a big 4.8MW installation that it commissioned in 2018, before the worst of the loadshedding hit. At the time, it was one of the biggest rooftop PV systems of its kind in the world.

Most of the solar was installed in response to loadshedding as a way to keep the lights on, keep the malls open and reduce the need to run expensive diesel generators. Solar has the added advantage of helping to reduce the mall’s carbon footprint.

Surprisingly, the Maponya Mall in Soweto is one of the very few big malls that don’t have rooftop solar.

Produced in partnership with Our City News.