COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

RMB buys 25% stake in Remgro

Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) has acquired a 25% stake in a Remgro-owned electricity trader, Energy Exchange of Southern Africa. Remgro, chaired by Johann Rupert, developed the exchange over the past five years and it allows corporates to purchase electricity from renewable energy-independent power producers.

According to a joint statement issued by the companies on Wednesday, RMB now has a 25% shareholding in Remgro's energy investment vehicle, Ubiquity Energy platform. Ubiquity is the holding company of Energy Exchange.

Energy Exchange is licensed with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) as an electricity trader.

In response to questions, RMB said the exchange's intellectual property and technical trading capacity - the completion of all the systems, legal and regulatory processes - had been built over the past five years.

But the exchange has become fully operational and gathered momentum around October 2021, after President Cyril Ramaphosa lifted the licence threshold on independent power projects to 100MW in June of that year.

Government has since removed the licensing cap indefinitely, to get generation capacity as quickly as possible online, in response to the energy crisis.

The exchange allows commercial and industrial entities to purchase electricity from licensed independent power producers. They may choose to meet all their energy needs through the exchange (by purchasing all the energy they need). Or they can purchase a portion of their electricity from the exchange and still rely on Eskom or embedded generation (like rooftop solar PV) to meet the remainder of their energy needs.-Fin24