The electrical certificate of compliance requirements in South Africa turn on one word, and it is not a word that appears on any training certificate. For new electrical installation work, a CoC may only be issued by a registered person who exercised general control over that work while it was being carried out. A PV GreenCard cannot do that. Nor can an inspection arranged after the panels are already on the roof.
That is the position the Electrical Contractors' Association of South Africa set out in a technical notice dated 10 August 2026. It is addressed to banks, insurers, municipalities and property owners rather than to installers. The association is telling the people who pay for solar work that they have been checking the wrong document.
The rule itself sits in the Electrical Installation Regulations, 2009, published as Government Notice R242 in Government Gazette 31975 on 6 March 2009 under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993.
The credential everyone checks is not the one that counts
Solar PV has grown fast enough in South Africa to produce its own set of credentials. The PV GreenCard, AREP P4 and the ECA(SA) PV Training Certificate have all become visible enough that an installer will lead with one in a quote.
ECA(SA)'s position is that none of them is a registration. They are supplementary industry credentials. They may show additional PV training, technical development or participation in a quality programme, and they carry no statutory authority to undertake, control or certify electrical installation work.
The problem the association names is not that these programmes exist. It is that banks, insurers, municipalities and end users have started placing more weight on the voluntary certificate than on the registration the law requires. A homeowner who asks for a GreenCard and gets one has run a check that feels complete and proves very little.
The three questions that come first
ECA(SA) sets out what to establish before appointing anyone to a solar PV electrical installation. Three questions, in order.
- Is the person or business registered as an electrical contractor in terms of the Electrical Installation Regulations?
- Is that electrical contractor itself a registered person, or does it employ a registered person on a full-time basis?
- Will the work be carried out under the general control of an appropriately registered person acting within the scope of that registration?
General control is the phrase doing the work in the third question, and it is not ECA(SA)'s coinage. The Regulations define it themselves, as the instruction, guidance and supervision of a registered person over electrical installation work that is being carried out. Read the tense. That is something which happens while the installation is being built. It is not a signature collected at the end.
Two other words in those questions are defined terms rather than descriptions. A registered person is an electrical tester for single phase, an installation electrician or a master installation electrician. An electrical contractor is whoever undertakes to do the electrical installation work for somebody else, and must be registered as such, and must either be a registered person or employ one full-time. Neither term means "has done a course".
Why the sign-off afterwards does not work
This is the practice the notice closes, and it is the one to understand if you own the roof.
A company that is not registered as an electrical contractor does the solar PV electrical work. Once the panels are up and the inverter is in, a registered person who was never on site is brought in to inspect it and issue the CoC. ECA(SA) says plainly that this should not happen.
The reason sits in the requirement itself. A registered person issuing a CoC has to satisfy themselves of two things by inspection and test. That the work complies with the requirements, and that it was carried out under their own general control. That applies to a new installation and equally to an extension or alteration of an existing one.
Worth separating this from the CoC most people have actually held. On an existing installation nobody has touched, a registered person may inspect it, test it and certify it, and that is the ordinary certificate that changes hands when a house is sold. The general control condition is what attaches the moment somebody does new work. Solar PV is new work. So is every extension and alteration that comes with it.
So the certificate in your file may describe work its signatory never supervised. It will look identical to one that does not.
What this costs the person who owns the building
The notice names banks, insurers and municipalities for a reason. Those are the parties ECA(SA) says have been leaning on the voluntary certificate instead of the statutory one, and they are not the parties who carry the consequence.
The Regulations put that on the owner. Every user or lessor of an electrical installation must hold a valid CoC for it. Where an addition or alteration has been made to an installation that already had one, the user or lessor must obtain a CoC for at least that addition or alteration. And a CoC does not expire on its own, with one exception that catches people: ownership may not change hands on a certificate more than two years old.
That last one is the deadline hiding in this piece. A rooftop PV system installed today is an alteration to your electrical installation, it needs its own CoC, and the day you sell the building somebody will read that certificate properly for the first time. If the answer then is that the installer held a training certificate and a third party signed the paperwork, the document you paid for is doing none of the work you thought it was doing.
Worth being precise about who is saying this. ECA(SA) is an industry association, not a statutory body, and the notice is signed by Grant Seeman, its National Technical Advisor and Secretary. The authority sits in the Electrical Installation Regulations. The association is telling you where to look. It is not making the rule.
Where the training certificates do belong
None of this makes the programmes worthless, and ECA(SA) does not say it does. The same association runs its own PV training, covering battery selection, system sizing and wiring configurations, and it still says the certificate that comes out of it is not a registration.
The order is the point. Establish the registration first. Then treat the industry certificate as additional evidence that the people doing the work have been trained on this particular technology, which is a fair thing to want on a roof full of DC cabling.
Arabella runs the registration check before a contractor is visible to a client at all. That is the difference between a client verifying a stranger and a client choosing from a network already verified. What that covers is set out on the client page, and the compliance notices we read each week sit in insights.
On Monday
Take the last solar quote or invoice on your desk. Find the electrical contractor registration number on it, not the training certificate number, and find the name of the registered person who will exercise general control over the work.
If either is missing, ask for both in writing before anything is ordered. On an installation already finished, ask the registered person who signed the CoC one question. Were you on site while the work was being done. The answer decides whether that certificate is worth anything.
