Pieter Nel is an Electrical Engineer with over twenty-five years of experience in the power industry. He started his career in ESKOM (South Africa’s largest electricity utility producing 45% of the electricity in Africa), where he developed electrical masterplan models that assisted distribution utilities in planning network development for the medium to long term. He moved to consultancy in 2007 when he was employed by Parsons Brinckerhoff Associates Ltd. (now WSP) in New Zealand and subsequently by Sinclair Knight Merz (now Jacobs). In 2009, Pieter formed his own consultancy company (Nel Consulting Limited, a member of the MRC Group) and is now the Managing Director of the company.

For almost fifteen years, Pieter has been actively involved in providing consultancy services to energy regulators and regulated entities in different jurisdictions, most specifically in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions. This entailed managing several major regulatory projects involving generation, transmission and distribution utilities and a broad range of projects necessary to reform the electric power industry. Pieter has been assisting the Energy Regulatory Commission of the Philippines with the implementation of Performance-Based Regulation with a specific focus on tariff setting and developing rules, procedures and standards since 2008. He has also undertaken numerous projects for the New Zealand Commerce Commission and the Economic Regulation Authority in Australia concerning applying price regulation to regulated utilities. He is also about to provide technical assistance to the National Energy Authority in Papua New Guinea through the Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership Activity of the USAID. 

Pieter also specialises in utility management and has held key positions in electricity utilities. He has acted as General Manager of the Ijora District in Lagos, Nigeria, a contract he implemented to assist the then Nigerian Electricity Power Authority to prepare the power industry for privatisation. Moreover, during the recent privatisation process of Nigeria, he was appointed as the Deputy CEO of Eko Electricity Distribution Company to support the Board during the change management period and determine efficiency improvements required to comply with regulatory requirements and improve financial viability. Following Pieter’s appointment in Eko, he was appointed as Strategic Advisor to the winning bidders of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company, where he acted as the point person for the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) during the tariff development phase and was responsible for developing and presenting the regulatory tariff proposal, and implementing the newly developed tariffs and Key Performance Indicators.