I think the idea of not needing an electricity grid or less of a grid is quite appealing as well.

There are a lot of reasons why you’d want a grid but the grid is also what makes electricity a commodity.

The biggest obstacle to this idea in South Africa is that both small-scale solar and electric vehicles are too expensive for most households

That’s a huge issue. South Africa already does rooftop solar at the household level: it’s done by people wealthy enough to afford it who want to escape rolling electricity blackouts. It’s very expensive, with the batteries and inverters and all.

The article advocates for replacing any battery system integrated into the house with an electric car battery. That requires every household to own at least one EV with a large enough battery capacity to power the household, and the EV owner to accept additional battery degradation to power their home and night, and the car to be parked at home permanently at night. That’s also going to be very expensive. Look at the countries listed in the article looking at such a system: Japan, Germany and China. Far, far ahead of South Africa economically.

As for feeding the grid, Eskom, the state owned enterprise that is the nation’s sole electricity supplier, is never going to accept this. Most of the money made in the household consumer section (seperate from industry) is from selling wealthy households electricity, who consume considerably more electricity than middle class and lower income households. These wealthy households installing rooftop solar with battery storage systems and inverters to escape rolling electricity blackouts has already caused Eskom to take a big hit to their revenue and increase electricity prices. South Africa is facing an 18-20% electricity price increase over the next two years. On top of previous large increases post 2020. If households are allowed to sell electricity to the grid and Eskom sells even less electricity, prices are going to go up further to make up for reduced sales. This is not to make profit, but to pay off debts due to mismanagement and corruption of Eskom.

The quickest and easiest way for South Africa to fix it’s electricity crisis would be to get the 50% of already installed generation capacity that is currently offline for maintenance, back online. Then proceed to renewables in the future once the situation has stabilised.