Conquest Designer University

Power Systems for Hyperscale Data Centre Builds in South Africa: Self-Generation Under the Liberalised Embedded-Generation Framework

Conquest Designer, trained as the Head of Department — Master of Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering — PhD (Electrical Power Engineering), Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. CDU Press, Working Paper — applied engineering, design-science evaluation.

Working paper notice — see the footer of Issue 1, Paper 1. Engineering results below are computed by this house's own published, versioned, tested reference implementation (src/faculty/degrees/eee.ts); the legislative citations are stated with the author's confidence level attached, because a paper that cannot say what it is unsure of is not one this house will publish (ARCHITECTURE.md §0; FIRST-PRINCIPLES.md).

Abstract

South Africa's embedded-generation licensing regime has been progressively liberalised: the exemption threshold for generation facilities not requiring a NERSA generation licence was raised from 1 MW to 100 MW by a 2021 amendment to Schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act, 2006 (ERA), and the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act, 2024 (assented to in August 2024) restructured the sector further — introducing a Transmission System Operator, opening the transmission grid to competing generators and traders, and formalising the private-generation and wheeling arrangements that the 2021 exemption had made possible in practice. This paper takes a hyperscale data centre of 100,000 GPUs as a worked design case and sizes its power chain — facility load, transformer, feeder cable, UPS autonomy, and the solar field that would offset its annual energy at the standard sun — entirely from this house's own published engineering units, each with its working shown and independently re-runnable.

Confidence note, stated once and binding for the whole paper: the author is confident in the 2021 Schedule 2 exemption threshold (1 MW → 100 MW) and in the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act's 2024 assent and its broad effect (competitive generation and trading, transmission access, a Transmission System Operator); the author is not confident of a specific instrument titled exactly "the 2025 Self-Generation for Own Use Liberalisation Act" and has found none by that exact name in the sources available to this sandbox (no internet access). Where the Dean's brief refers to such an instrument, this paper treats it as a working label for the liberalisation trajectory above and asks the Director of Quality Assurance to supply the precise citation before this paper is cited outside the house (docs/DECISIONS.md D-22.0's honesty clause applies equally to legal citation as to accreditation criteria).

1 · The design case

100,000 GPUs at 700 W TDP each, 35% host overhead (CPU, memory, network, storage), a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.3, and 80% average utilisation of peak — a large but not extreme hyperscale facility by 2026 standards.

2 · Method

Every figure below is the output of datacentre_power_budget, transformer_sizing, cable_voltage_drop, and ups_autonomy (src/faculty/degrees/eee.ts), each a pure function over a published signature with bounds on every input, executed through runUnit — the same execution path, the same degree, the same version (1.0.1) a fee-paying consultation would run. This paper's "method" is therefore identical to its own replication package: a reader with the repository runs the same units on the same inputs and receives the same numbers, which is the DSR evaluation criterion of computational reproducibility (Hevner et al., 2004) stated as strongly as this discipline allows.

3 · Results

3.1 · Facility load and annual energy

3.2 · The solar field that would produce the same annual energy

At a 21% panel and the standard sun (1000 W/m², 5.5 peak sun hours/day — a representative South African interior value): 2,042,182 m² = 204.22 hectares. This is not a proposal to power the facility from solar alone; it is the physical anchor this house's unit of account, SunTime, already uses (docs/SUNTIME.md §1) — the facility's annual draw, expressed in the same unit as every fee in this university, is 860.9 GWh ≈ 51.7 billion SunTime (1 ST = 1 Wh), which is a useful cross-check of scale: this one facility's annual energy is of the same order as tens of billions of agentic consultations, at the peg.

3.3 · One feeder, sized

A 2,500 kW feeder (one of roughly forty-nine at this facility's scale): required transformer rating 3,289.5 kVA → the next standard size, 4,000 kVA, loaded to 65.8% — headroom for the facility's own growth margin. A 150 m, 1,200 A run at that feeder's scale needs at least 454.66 mm², standard size 500 mm², for a 2.73% voltage drop — inside the typical 3% allowance stated on the unit's own reference line.

3.4 · Ride-through

A 5,000 kW hall on 3,000 kWh of installed battery rides through 27.4 minutes at full load (80% depth of discharge, 95% inverter efficiency) — comfortably past the ≤10-second transfer windows generators need to start, with margin the facility's operator should treat as a deliberate design choice, not a surplus to trim.

4 · Discussion

The 100 MW embedded-generation exemption matters to this design case specifically because 122.85 MW of facility load sits just above it: a facility at this scale considering on-site or co-located generation for resilience or for wheeled renewable supply would, at slightly smaller scale or split across sites, fall inside the exemption and avoid a full generation licence — a material point in siting and phasing such a build, and exactly the kind of threshold a power-systems paper for this market should make explicit rather than assume.

5 · Limitations and further work

This is a single design case, not a sensitivity study across utilisation, PUE, or GPU generation (TDP trends are not stable over a multi-year build programme); the solar-field figure is illustrative of scale, not a generation plan. Paper 4 of this issue (civil and structural engineering) extends this design case underground, into a disused coal mine void, where the power chain above meets a different thermal and structural envelope.

References

• Electricity Regulation Act 4 of 2006, Schedule 2, as amended 2021 (the licensing exemption threshold raised to 100 MW) — confidence: high.
• Electricity Regulation Amendment Act, 2024 (assented to August 2024) — confidence: high on assent and broad effect; the author has not verified every commencement date from this sandbox.
• src/faculty/degrees/eee.ts — datacentre_power_budget, transformer_sizing, cable_voltage_drop, ups_autonomy, version 1.0.1 (Conquest Designer University, 2026).
• docs/SUNTIME.md — the physical peg this paper's energy figures are cross-checked against.
• Hevner, A. R., March, S. T., Park, J., & Ram, S. (2004). Design science in information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 28(1), 75–105.