By Patience Gondo
At Kwalu suburb in Beitbridge, electricity has never been seen.
There are no Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) poles to trace, no meters to read, no switch to flip when darkness falls. From the beginning, residents built their lives around one certainty, if there was to be light, it would come from the sun.
Now, that way of life is set to be measured.
The Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) has announced plans to conduct a nationwide survey to assess electricity produced by household solar systems.
ZERA chief executive officer Edington Mazambani confirmed the authority is engaging a contractor to carry out the exercise, aimed at mapping what regulators describe as a vast but largely undocumented shadow grid of private electricity generation.
Kwalu offers a stark illustration of how that shadow grid emerged not by choice, but by necessity.
“When we moved here, we knew clearly there was no electricity,” said Lindani Ncube, a Kwalu resident. “So the first thing you think about is solar. Before a sofa, before a television, you buy panels. Now I am confused about what exactly ZERA wants to survey on something I bought for myself.”
Across Zimbabwe, households and businesses have increasingly turned to solar energy in response to persistent power shortages, unreliable supply, and rising electricity tariffs. Businesses in particular, have invested heavily in large scale solar installations, significantly reducing reliance on the national grid and contributing to declining electricity consumption figures.
The shift has quietly transformed Zimbabwe’s energy landscape. While demand for grid power has fallen, privately generated electricity has surged much of it operating beyond formal regulatory oversight.
An energy expert who requested anonymity said this information gap is what ZERA is now attempting to close.
Globally, Zimbabwe’s move mirrors trends in countries with significant solar capacity, where regulatory frameworks are used to manage, incentivize or structure household and commercial solar markets. China, the world’s largest solar producer relies on strong government led industrial policy and subsidies, controlling more than 80 percent of global solar manufacturing.
The United States uses a mix of federal tax credits, state renewable portfolio standards and streamlined permitting systems such as SolarAPP+.
Germany regulates solar through its Renewable Energy Act, while promoting community energy cooperatives and small-scale balcony solar systems. India operates under national compliance frameworks overseen by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, supported by standards set by the Bureau of Indian Standards and rooftop solar subsidies.
In most of these countries, regulation followed rapid growth often to standardize safety, grid integration and planning not to restrict access.
But in communities like Kwalu, where the national grid never arrived, the survey raises uneasy questions.
Residents who have never benefited from public electricity infrastructure are struggling to understand why power they generate purely for survival now requires official attention.
ZERA officials said the exercise is intended to inform national energy planning and support the integration of renewable energy into future policy.
Still, trust remains fragile.
For residents of Kwalu, solar power represents self reliance in the absence of state provision. Any attempt to measure it, they say should also acknowledge why it became necessary in the first place.
As Zimbabwe seeks to understand its rapidly changing energy landscape, Kwalu stands as a reminder that the country’s solar revolution was not sparked by incentives, subsidies or policy but by necessity.