In a country with a faltering supply of baseload electricity provided by one or more large central power utilities, alternative supplies of electricity necessarily become attractive. One such alternative is photovoltaic solar power. And indeed, as an alternative, decentralised rooftop solar power installations are more and more becoming a visual feature across South Africa's urban landscape.

Unfortunately, rooftop solar power installations suffer high up-front costs. So to assist in the efficient allocation of these costs, this study helps to specify the required size of a rooftop installation. In particular, based on a physical model of solar insolation, this study specifies both the required number of solar panels and number of batteries comprising an installation. In the physical model, a novel concept dubbed the Effective Global Horizontal Irradiation is introduced to tractably account for the effect of tilting the solar panels towards the sun.

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