Any unilateral step by Ethiopia to fill its hydropower project, called the Renaissance Dam, in July would directly threaten Sudan’s national security, Sudanese Irrigation and Water Resources Minister Yasser Abbas said on Saturday. Sudan is also proposing a mediation role for the United States, European Union, United Nations and African Union as a way of breaking the deadlock in talks about the dam between Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia, Abbas told Reuters in an interview.
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa’s (Nersa’s) electricity subcommittee decided, on February 5, not to approve Eskom’s application for the emergency procurement of electricity from eight private generators under its Short-Term Power Purchase Programme (STPPP). In March 2020, the State-owned utility issued a request for proposals for supply of short-term power under the STPPP scheme, which was first initiated in October 2012 to help Eskom mitigate its capacity constraints and reduce the risk of load-shedding.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter has expressed support for a lifting of the licensing threshold on distributed generators from 1 MW to 50 MW. Engineering News editor Terence Creamer unpacks the significance of this statement.
South Africa’s struggling state power utility Eskom said on Friday that it would implement scheduled power cuts from 12:00 until Sunday evening. Eskom said on its Twitter feed that outages would be “stage 2”, which allow for up to 2 000 MW of the national load to be shed. It added that more information would follow.
Scientists at Cornell University’s Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability, in Ithaca in New York state in the US, have developed a new, digital, global wind atlas. Entitled “A Global Assessment of Extreme Wind Speeds for Wind Energy Applications”, it was unveiled in a paper published in the journal Nature Energy on January 25. It is the first geospatially explicit (that is, its datasets are connected with locations), uniform and publicly available source of information on extreme wind speeds. “Cost-efficient expansion of the wind-energy industry is enabled by access to this newly released digital atlas of the extreme wind conditions under which wind turbines will operate at locations around the world,” pointed out Cornell Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Sara Pryor. “This kind of information will ensure the correct selection of wind turbines for specific deployment and help ensure cost-efficient and dependable electricity generation from those turbines.”
Renewable energy company RWE Renewables has announced a new project to reduce the commercial uncertainty around the modelling of the Global Blockage Effect (GBE).
The GBE in offshore wind is the latest joint industry initiative under the Offshore Wind Accelerator (Owa) programme and is designed to improve understanding of the true impact of GBE by undertaking the first of its kind measurement campaign under real offshore conditions.
The Energy Intensive Users Group of Southern Africa (EIUG) has added its voice to growing calls to increase South Africa’s licence exemption threshold from 1 MW to 50 MW, but says the change should be accompanied by an updating of the current framework for wheeling power across the network. In a statement, the EIUG, which represents large mining and industrial companies that consume about 40% of South Africa’s electrical energy, said it was encouraged by Eskom’s support for the raising of the threshold, as well as CEO Andre de Ruyter’s offer to assist customers with their distributed-generation applications.
Harith General Partners, which funds infrastructure development across Africa, is pushing ahead with plans to build the first gas-fired power plants in South Africa’s industrial hub of Gauteng and is exploring options to source the fuel. The fund manager wants to build two gas-fired plants at the site of its coal-fired Kelvin Power Station, which lies east of Johannesburg close to the city’s main airport. The government’s energy blueprint, known as the Integrated Resource Plan, includes proposals to bring gas to the region from 2023 at the earliest, and that target isn’t ambitious enough, according to Sipho Makhubela, Harith’s chief executive officer.
Special advisor to Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Zane Dangor stated on Thursday that vaccine nationalism is the opposite of the solidarity approach that was spoken of at the outset of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Dangor was addressing an online discussion on ‘Trade, Patent Law and Vaccine Procurement during the Covid-19 pandemic’ which focused on issues and lessons for the global south.
The organisers of the Invest Cape Town and the Business Hub GreenPitch Challenge 2021 have identified ten innovators and entrepreneurs with economically viable green economy innovation business ideas to pitch those ideas to a panel of expert judges at a virtual event on February 10. “The entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to interact with potential investors, business incubators, local government decision-makers and green economy experts. The judging panel is made up of local and international investment and innovation experts representing the City of Cape Town, Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism, the South African Renewable Energy Business Incubator, EdgeGrowth, PwC and the Solar Impulse Foundation,” says green economy solutions non-profit GreenCape.
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