Smart Arbitrage — Jua Renewables

Jua Renewables · Retail & Commercial

Arbitrage the city peak.

Jua funds, builds, owns and operates solar and battery plants on retail and commercial buildings in City Power's supply area. You provide the roof and the offtake, buy the kilowatt-hours at a project tariff below the grid's peak and standard bands — and keep a share of the value the arbitrage creates. No capital, no performance risk, nothing on your balance sheet.

Request an assessment How the arbitrage works

4×Grid price spread across the daily and seasonal cycle

3Value streams captured by one plant

R0Capital cost to the landlord

1 800kWh per kWp a year at the optimum — a top-tier inland resource

The problem

The expensive hours are also the customer hours.

City Power's FY2026/27 increase is 8.63% across customer categories, and the tariff clock is unforgiving: both daily peak windows — 07h00 to 10h00 and 18h00 to 20h00 — sit squarely inside trading hours, with the winter peak rate at 766.24 c/kWh.

On top of the energy charge sits a maximum demand charge of R461.28 per kVA every month, billed on the worst quarter-hour of the year. One bad minute in January locks twelve months of invoices, and tenant behaviour cannot move that line. Only a battery can.

The same structure that makes the bill punishing makes the opportunity: the grid price varies more than four-fold across the daily and seasonal cycle. A plant that buys the cheap hour and serves the expensive one sits on top of that spread — and captures it three ways at once.

City Power winter tariff by hour · c/kWh

Large Customer time-of-use (LV), winter weekdays, FY2026/27, excluding network surcharge and VAT. The controller charges the battery in the 22h00–06h00 off-peak window and discharges through both peak windows. Summer rates are lower (off-peak 186.35c) and the spread thinner — the model is winter-weighted accordingly.

The concept

One plant. Three value streams. Captured together.

Smart arbitrage is the simultaneous optimisation of three independent value streams from the same roof — and retail is the property type built for it, because HVAC, lighting, refrigeration and point-of-sale all peak with the sun.

STREAM 1

Solar self-consumption

The centre's load profile follows PV output — not the opposite. Most of what the roof generates is consumed on site, automatically displacing the standard and peak tariff windows where daytime consumption sits.

STREAM 2

Time-of-use shift

The battery charges from the grid in the 22h00–06h00 off-peak window — permitted under embedded-generation rules — and discharges into the same load through both peak windows. In winter the gross spread is R5.66 per kWh; about R5.38 after round-trip losses.

STREAM 3

Demand & power factor

Battery and solar together shave the worst quarter-hour that sets the monthly demand charge, and the inverters clean the reactive power drawn. On an illustrative centre, a 340 kVA shave is worth around R1.57 million a year in demand charges alone.

Aerial view of a solar-clad retail mall with photovoltaic carport canopies in the Witwatersrand belt — Roof and carports working as one plant — the asset class whose load shape lines up with the sun.

Battery energy storage room with racked cabinets and wall-mounted packs — Storage sized to the centre's own load — charged cheap, dispatched into the peak.

Johannesburg's altitude and clear inland sky put a real flat-roof design at roughly 1 650 – 1 800 kWh per kWp a year — among the best commercial solar resources on the continent, facing north into the sun.

The landlord upside

Zero capital. Zero risk. A share of the arbitrage.

On an illustrative 40 000 m² centre in the southern corridor, the three streams together produce an annual value pool of R3.56 million to R5.10 million, tariff-dependent. Every 10% of that pool retained is worth roughly R356 000 to R510 000 a year — for providing a roof that today earns nothing.

There is no payback period to wait out, because there is no capital outlay to recover: the saving appears on the first invoice after energisation.

Common-area cost down

Lower recovery at the same gross rent — a sharper leasing proposition.

Demand charge falls

The kVA peak is shaved — a fixed cost that never moves favourably on its own.

Income from inert assets

Roof and parking become productive infrastructure rather than a maintenance liability.

Resilience through outages

Trading, refrigeration, point-of-sale, lifts and security ride through grid drops.

Tenant retention

Lower occupancy cost and continuity of trade — defensible arguments at lease renewal.

Exit value & ESG

A measured renewable utility is a green-building signal a buyer will price in.

The model

You buy kilowatt-hours. We carry everything else.

Jua designs, funds, builds, owns and operates the plant on your asset. Because Jua owns it, Jua carries the depreciation, the insurance, the spares and the replacement risk. The landlord's job is three lines long: provide the roof and the offtake, receive the invoice, keep a share of the value. The whole ask, to begin, is twelve months of your City Power bills.

Data collection

Send twelve months of City Power bills. We model the baseline and reply with an indicative savings estimate within two weeks.

No cost · no obligation

Site assessment

A technical visit for the roof and carport survey, structural review, single-line assessment and half-hourly logging where the metering does not already provide it.

Handled entirely by Jua

Proposal and design

Preliminary engineering, solar and storage sizing, indicative yield, the value pool modelled stream by stream, and a term-sheet structure for your centre.

A number you can budget against

Agreement and approvals

The power purchase agreement is negotiated and signed, and Jua runs the full City Power process: embedded-generator registration, bidirectional metering, and an ECSA-signed certificate of compliance to SANS 10142-1 and NRS 097-2.

The paperwork is ours, not yours

Build and operate

Construction, commissioning and energisation timed around tenant trading hours, not through them. Then monitoring, maintenance and contractually guaranteed output for the full term.

Commercial operation onward

Regulatory position in City Power's supply area: systems under 1 MW carry the standard embedded-generator regime with no generation licence; plants are sized to serve the building's own load as a net consumer, with no export and no wheeling; prepaid metering migrates to the conventional structure before energisation.

Risk allocation

Eight risks sit with us. Two sit with you.

The promise that Jua funds the capital is only credible if Jua also carries the risk. The landlord carries exactly two things: the roof — with any structural reinforcement arranged at our cost — and the commitment to buy the kilowatt-hours the plant delivers, at the contracted tariff, for the contracted term. Nothing else.

Capital

The entire plant cost, financed and amortised by Jua and its funding partners.

Performance

Generation and uptime contractually guaranteed. If the system under-delivers, Jua earns less.

Technology and obsolescence

Inverters, panels and battery packs replaced when warranted, for the full term.

Insurance

All-risk cover including business interruption, held and paid by Jua.

Operations and maintenance

Scheduled service, spares and warranty management for the full term of the agreement.

Monitoring and reporting

Continuous 24/7 monitoring, with your monthly statement of energy delivered and savings achieved.

Compliance

Embedded-generator registration, bidirectional metering, certificates of compliance — filed and carried by Jua.

Commercial

Tariff movement, seasonality and consumption shifts — priced and carried by Jua, not passed back to you.

The agreement

What you sign, and what a kilowatt-hour costs.

The commercial terms are standard across the programme. The tariff, the landlord's share, the term and the escalator are confirmed at term sheet — from your own metered data, never from a brochure.

Comparative cost per kWh · annual weighted · c/kWh

City Power peak · annual weighted433.06

City Power standard · annual weighted254.95

Jua project band · all-in170 – 240

City Power off-peak · the charging window189.87

City Power FY2026/27 Large Customer TOU (LV), weighted annual, excluding surcharges and VAT. The Jua band is project-dependent across R1.70 – R2.40 per kWh and sits below the grid's peak and standard bands at every point in the range; the off-peak band is the battery's charging window, not a buying opportunity.

R3.6–5.1mIllustrative annual value pool on a 40 000 m² centre — solar self-consumption, time-of-use arbitrage and demand shaving, modelled stream by stream.

R356–510kPer year, for every 10% of the pool the landlord retains. Share, term and escalator are agreed at the term sheet.

Month 1Cash-flow positive from the first invoice after energisation — there is no capital outlay to recover.

Term	Standard position
Structure	One long-term power purchase agreement. Jua is the single counterparty for development, construction and operations.
Tariff	R1.70 – R2.40 per kWh, project dependent — below City Power's peak and standard bands at every point in the range, with storage, operations, maintenance, insurance and monitoring inside the number.
Landlord share	A share of the value pool the plant creates, agreed at term sheet, paid for making the roof available.
Guaranteed output	Generation and uptime contractually guaranteed, measured against metered data rather than estimates.
Capital contribution	Nil. Jua and its funding partners fund one hundred per cent of the plant, including any structural reinforcement.
Grid connection	Your City Power connection stays in place for supplemental supply, off-peak charging and resilience. Nothing is taken away.
Site	Roof and carport canopies under a registered lease or servitude for the term. No transfer, no change to title.
Compliance	Embedded-generator registration, bidirectional metering and ECSA-signed certificates of compliance to SANS 10142-1 and NRS 097-2 — filed and carried by Jua.
Confidentiality	Mutual, and POPIA-compliant. Your consumption data, financials and tariffs are not disclosed.

Indicative standard terms. The tariff, share and term for any given centre are determined by the assessment in step 01 and recorded in the agreement itself.

Who it suits

Buildings whose load follows the sun.

The model works best where daytime consumption is substantial and continuous — and where an interruption costs more than electricity does.

Assets

Regional and community malls
Value-retail and big-box centres
Strip centres with parking canopies
Mixed-use retail and commercial
Logistics with daytime load

What we look for

Twelve months of City Power bills — that is the whole ask
Trading-hours load: HVAC, refrigeration, lifts, POS
Roof area and carport potential
Conventional TOU metering, or willing to migrate from prepaid
Intention to hold the asset

Geography

City Power supply area
Southern Johannesburg corridor first
Witwatersrand belt
Other metros on enquiry

The corridor advantage

Several centres assessed together improve pricing
One approval queue, one programme
Portfolio owners welcome

Enquiries

Start with your City Power bill.

Send twelve months of bills and we do the rest: a complimentary baseline, indicative savings and a written term-sheet structure for your centre, within two weeks.

CompanyJua Renewables (Pty) Ltd

Registration number2024/802401/07

A subsidiary ofJUA Investments (Pty) Ltd · Reg. No. K2025/011605/07

OfficesFirst Floor, Constantia Emporium
Cnr Ladies Mile & Spaanschemat River Road
Constantia, Cape Town 7806, South Africa

Retail & commercial programmematthew.silvester@juarenewables.com

General enquiriesinfo@juarenewables.com

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