Sable Grid Storage Business Plan — Executive Summary

Sable Grid Storage (Pty) Ltd is a South African independent storage power producer established to develop, own and operate utility-scale battery energy…

Executive Summary

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Sable Grid Storage (Pty) Ltd is a South African independent storage power producer established to develop, own and operate utility-scale battery energy storage systems. Its flagship asset, Project Sizanani, is a 100 MW / 400 MWh four-hour lithium iron phosphate facility to be constructed near Aggeneys in the Northern Cape,a transmission corridor where renewable generation is most constrained and where system flexibility consequently commands the greatest value.

South Africa’s electricity market has been structurally reformed. The Electricity Regulation Amendment Act ended the single-buyer monopoly from January 2025, the National Transmission Company has been established, and a combined transmission and flexibility investment pipeline exceeding R440 billion is now in procurement. Storage sits at the centre of this transition: it firms variable renewable output, defers grid reinforcement, provides the ancillary services the system operator urgently requires, and captures widening peak to off-peak spreads in an increasingly traded market.

100 MW

400 MWh, four-hour

R2.05bn

Total project cost

R615m

Equity raise

15 years

Contracted term

1.1 The proposition

The Company is raising R615 million of equity alongside R1.435 billion of senior debt to reach financial close and commercial operations, with follow-on rights over a 350 MW development pipeline. Revenue is anchored by a contracted, availability-based capacity payment structured on the Battery Energy Storage Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme model, supplemented by ancillary services and a deliberately conservative merchant allocation. Approximately 91% of base-case revenue is a fixed, inflation-indexed capacity payment earned by keeping the facility available, independent of how often the buyer cycles it.

Figure 1. Revenue stack across the fifteen-year contracted term.

R million	Year 1	Year 3	Year 5	Year 10	Year 15
Revenue	396	437	481	614	784
Operating costs	52	57	63	81	103
EBITDA	344	379	418	534	681
EBITDA margin	86.9%	86.9%	86.9%	86.9%	86.9%
Senior debt service	205	205	205	205	205
DSCR (CFADS, senior)	1.57×	1.74×	1.86×	1.91×	2.45×

1.2 Why this project can succeed

Policy with money behind it. Storage is procured through successive competitive bid windows and embedded in the national resource plan, within a transmission and flexibility programme exceeding R440 billion. Roughly 1,744 MW and 6,976 MWh have already been contracted across three windows, creating a lender precedent book to price against.
Contracted, availability-based cash flow. Fifteen-year capacity payments transfer market and utilisation risk to the offtaker. The Company retains only the risks it can manage,availability, round-trip efficiency and degradation,each of which is mirrored by a wrapped supplier obligation.
Storage is the solution to grid constraint, not another claimant on it. Unlike new generation competing for scarce export capacity in the Northern Cape, a battery both absorbs and injects and can relieve congestion. Grid access for storage is therefore structurally easier than for generation in the same corridor, a material advantage of this asset class.
An empowered, experienced sponsor group. 51% Black-owned at holding level with a Level 1 contributor structure, community trust and employee trust participation, a chief executive who has delivered 1.1 GW of grid connections, a chief financial officer who has closed R14 billion of energy debt, and a technical director who has delivered 600 MWh of grid-scale storage.
A scalable platform. A 350 MW pipeline behind the flagship offers follow-on deployment at declining development cost per megawatt, sharing corporate overhead and repeatable contracting.

1.3 Independent findings in summary

Key findingSix findings bear on bankability; the first is structural

First and most important, the procurement programme on which roughly 91% of revenue depends has been site-specific in all three bid windows to date, with the buyer designating substations and appointing one preferred bidder per site, a structure that a developer-originated site at Aggeneys does not obviously fit. Second, the Company holds no contracted revenue: it is bid-ready, not awarded, and the tariff is a competitive clearing price it does not control. Third, the stated debt-service cover of 1.68× is calculated on EBITDA; on a cash-flow basis after tax and reserve funding it is 1.57×, and 1.35× once mezzanine service is included, closer to the 1.30× lock-up covenant than the headline suggests. Fourth, effective gearing is 77:23 rather than 70:30, because the R150 million mezzanine is subordinated debt counted within equity. Fifth, the stated maintenance reserve profile appears to fall roughly R95 million short of the year-14 augmentation. Sixth, the accelerated capital allowance assumed in the tax line may not be available to standalone storage and should be confirmed. Each is quantified in Sections 15 to 18.

1.4 How this plan exceeds a template

This document applies project-finance discipline. It reconstructs the senior and mezzanine amortisation schedules from first principles, models the capital allowance position with and without accelerated relief, computes debt-service cover on three separate definitions, tests the maintenance reserve against the scheduled augmentation programme, extends the projection to twenty years across the contracted term and the re-contracting tail, and measures returns on both a commercial-operation and a construction-adjusted basis so that the sponsor’s stated figures can be reconciled rather than merely restated.