South Africa's commercial and industrial energy buyers gather in Sandton this week for the C&I Energy + Storage Summit, a two day meeting convened by the VUKA Group at The Maslow Hotel in Johannesburg. The summit runs across 28 and 29 October.
The agenda is built around a single question the organiser puts to delegates at the opening session: how businesses protect production and investment while the systems that supply their energy and water change around them. Rising electricity and water costs, shifting procurement options and decarbonisation pressure have moved energy from a facilities concern to a board level one for South African manufacturers.
Programme themes published by the organiser cover wheeling, battery storage, tariff design and wider market reform. The VUKA Group describes the meeting as a decision stage event rather than an introductory one, aimed at private energy users who are already evaluating procurement structures and at the developers, financiers and technology providers who serve them.
Delegates are drawn from manufacturing, mining, data centres, agriculture, property, retail and logistics, alongside independent power producers, financiers, engineering and construction contractors, regulators, system operators and government. The summit is co-located with the EIUG Conference and with Water Security Africa, which places industrial water security on the same floor as power procurement.
For executives tracking the southern African energy transition, the Sandton meeting is a useful read on where corporate power purchasing is heading. South Africa's large industrial users have spent several years building private generation and storage capacity in response to grid constraints, and the regulatory architecture around wheeling and third party access has moved with them. A summit pitched at buyers rather than suppliers tends to surface what is actually being signed.
The event is held at The Maslow Hotel in Sandton, Johannesburg. The year is 2026.
