The return to a protracted period of load-shedding in March provided an unhappy reminder of South Africa’s energy deficit. It also served to confirm that new generation is needed, and needed immediately, to restore system stability. The quickest way to add new capacity would be to allow households and businesses to add small-scale embedded generation of up to 10 MW and for Eskom and municipal distributors to not only allow such generation to be fed into the grid but to also fairly compensate such ‘prosumers’. Sadly, pent-up supply of up to 2 000 MW is being tripped up by regulatory red tape.