South Africa has emerged from years of crippling blackouts into a new and quieter crisis — one of infrastructure rather than generation. Private capital, driven by necessity rather than ideology, is now building more renewable energy than government programs ever managed, yet the wires that carry that power cannot keep pace with ambition. The nation stands at a threshold where the energy transition it has already begun could either unlock broad economic renewal or stall against the hard limits of an aging, congested grid.