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Though still modest by global standards, clean tech is taking off in South Africa, and its fortunes are closely tied to the country’s booming renewable energy sector. The Energy Pioneer showcases 5 exciting clean energy tech startups driving innovation across South Africa in 2026. These include compressed air energy storage, high-performance concentrated solar technology, and an intelligence service for land regeneration.

Moloi’s urban heat struggles mirror those of  2 million, mainly Black households, living in slums across South Africa’s cities. A local study, published in Bloomberg last month, released damning findings that Johannesburg city’s slums (where folks of color live) are 6 degrees Celsius hotter than wealthier suburbs. 

The Group of 20 (G20) gathering of the world's most powerful economies (excluding the US), kicked off in Johannesburg at the end of November. The host, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is a billionaire with deep coal roots and as a corporate investor in mines. He is trumpeting one of the summit’s main themes as breaking the world, especially the Global South, from the curse of ‘extractive colonialism’ and unleashing a wave of ‘green jobs’.

It was on the back of this polluting legacy that South Africa made lavish demands at the 2021 Conference of the Parties (COP) to combat climate change. The EU, Canada, Germany, the UK, and France promised to provide South Africa with $8.5bn in concessional finance. In return, South Africa pledged to shift its energy matrix toward renewable energy sources. Key to South Africa’s pledges was the decommissioning of 9 of its coal power plants by 2035.

Africa's first roadside vehicle emission data sensors went live in Johannesburg, the wealthiest city in South Africa, in July. The goal is to measure the tailpipe carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from a batch of 100,000 vehicles daily. To date, no city in sub-Saharan Africa has implemented car emission-free zones like those in Paris or Amsterdam. South Africa  is the 13 th  most carbon-polluting economy on earth. Raeesa Moolla , an air quality expert at the city's Wits Universi