The bottlenecks in South Africa’s national transmission grid, referred to as gridlock, are a major concern for the country’s wind power sector. This was highlighted during a panel discussion on the first day (Wednesday) of the Windaba 2025 conference, being held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Gridlock is hampering the connection of new renewable-energy sources to the grid. “The grid is a massively important issue,” affirmed South African renewable-energy company Anthem CEO James Cumming. He expects to see another period in which renewable-energy generators will have to wait for the grid to get the capacity to accommodate them, before they will be able to connect with it. He urges renewable energy and the other relevant entities to work together to create combined grid applications that have sufficient scale to make a grid connection credible.
Seriti Green CEO Peter Venn says the ease with which individuals with deep coal industry experience have transitioned into renewable energy has been a remarkable aspect of the company’s recent progress in implementing its first large-scale wind projects in the coal region of Mpumalanga. Seriti Green is majority owned by Seriti Resources, a black-owned coal mining company that has also contracted for all of the 500 GWh of electricity to be produced yearly from the first 155 MW phase of the Ummbila Emoyeni Wind Farm for its eight coal mines.
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