Business · Southern Africa
Cape Town battery plant stakes a claim in Africa’s storage export race
Solar MD’s Richmond Park manufacturing footprint sits at the centre of South Africa’s push to turn load-shedding-era demand into an export industry — with capacity claims that still need independent audit.
JOHANNESBURG — For a decade, South Africa’s battery story was mostly about imports and backyard installers racing load-shedding. That picture is shifting. In Richmond Park, Cape Town, Solar MD operates a large lithium-iron-phosphate assembly plant that the company and local reporting describe as among the continent’s first facilities at gigawatt-hour annual scale.
The firm’s About page says it was founded in Cape Town in 2014 by Kaloyan Dimov, Kostadin Petkov and James Eedes, and that it designs packs with an in-house battery management stack and CATL cells, spanning residential units to containerised systems the company says reach about 6.5 MWh. Deployment is claimed in more than 50 countries, with a Bulgaria assembly site and a Dubai sales office opening in the company’s timeline for 2023–24.
What “3 GWh” means — and what it does not
Company materials and contemporaneous coverage by MyBroadband and ESI Africa put the Richmond factory at roughly 15,000 square metres, operational from July 2024 and formally inaugurated at the end of November 2024. Solar MD states annual production capacity of about 3 GWh, with daily throughput rising from about 120 units at its earlier Montague Gardens site to as many as about 300 batteries a day at Richmond.
Those are capacity and company-stated figures, not independently audited shipment volumes. MyBroadband has also reminded readers that South Africa still largely assembles packs from imported cells rather than manufacturing cells from mineral feedstock at home — a distinction that matters when politicians talk about “battery factories.” AB24 therefore describes Solar MD as a major assembly footprint by reported capacity, not as a cell gigafactory.
Western Cape economic officials welcomed the plant at inauguration as part of regional investment and energy-security messaging. In June 2026, the City of Cape Town held a manufacturing-policy engagement at the Richmond site, with Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth James Vos citing the city’s Manufacturing Support Policy and export-readiness tools such as the Cape Trade Portal. Municipal cheerleading is not a financial audit; it does show how Cape industrial policy is using storage manufacturers as a showcase.
Export ambition versus verified volumes
Solar MD lists placements on the FT/Statista Africa’s Fastest-Growing Companies ranking for 2024, 2025 and 2026 (company cites #46, #38 and #49 respectively) and an AFSIA Storage Project of the Year nod for 2024. The FT/Statista list is a real ranking brand; AB24 has not re-scraped the underlying Statista tables for this piece and treats the ranks as company-reported.
The strategic pitch is familiar across African industrial policy: turn a domestic reliability crisis into a manufacturing platform that can sell into Europe, the Middle East and the rest of Africa. ESI Africa quoted management at the 2024 opening on expansion into MENA and India after Bulgaria. Whether export share matches the marketing remains an open reporting question — AB24 found no public customs series that isolates Solar MD’s shipped megawatt-hours.
Cluster effects
The same Richmond campus now anchors a public EV charging station operated by SAEV Charge, which uses Solar MD cabinets in its battery-backed highway design. That adjacency — storage OEM plus charge-point operator — is becoming a Southern African industrial cluster story as much as a product story. Distributors and installer networks sit one layer downstream.
For markets desks, the takeaway is structural: South Africa’s storage boom created a customer base; Cape Town is trying to keep the value-add onshore; and the firms that scale assembly first will set the tone for how African “battery manufacturing” is described in investor decks. The caution is equal and opposite: capacity claims travel faster than bills of lading.
Sources: Solar MD About page; MyBroadband factory coverage (2024–25); ESI Africa, Dec 2024; City of Cape Town / Invest Cape Town manufacturing engagement, 2 June 2026. Capacity, country-count and award ranks attributed to company or named secondary reporting.
— AB24 · Johannesburg