In the Budget Speech in late February, the South Africa government confirmed that it will continue and widen a Municipal EEDSM (energy efficiency demand side management) fund for another three-year cycle. The EEDSM programme is a grant fund for municipalities to implement energy efficient retrofits in city infrastructure.

The founder of Himin Solar, Huang Ming has been named one of the four winners of the 2011 Right Livelihood Awards, known informally as the alternative Nobel prize. According to the Swedish-based foundation that gives the award, he was honored for “his outstanding success in the development and mass-deployment of cutting-edge technologies for harnessing solar energy, thereby showing how dynamic emerging economies can contribute to resolving the global crisis of anthropogenic climate change.”

Three leading energy efficiency and renewable energy organizations – the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP, an international body), the Alliance to Save Energy (Alliance) and the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) – have jointly released their Compendium of Best Practices: Sharing Local and State Successes in Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from the United States, in which state and local governments share the key elements of their programs, lessons learned and what made each program a success.

In its report "The Governance of Power: shedding light on the electricity sector in South Africa", the Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI) makes a series of recommendations on how to promote open, transparent, and accountable decision-making processes in the South African electricity industry.

South Africa is a powerhouse of the African continent, but its growth in demand for energy is outstripping supply. This makes it one of the first in the world to look seriously at the widescale adoption of a renewable energy technology, solar water heating (SWH), as a mechanism for coping with a mismatch between energy supply and demand.