South Africa’s electricity reforms are again being prioritised amid uneven progress. Engineering News editor Terence Creamer unpacks the developments.
Financial services firm Standard Bank is investigating the use of edge certification frameworks for renewable energy systems in households to enable it to access international green funding that it can then lend on to households to accelerate the rate of installation of renewable energy systems. Accessing sustainability, or green, finances requires certification and there is low penetration of edge certifications in homes older than five years, which makes it difficult for the bank to provide the required assurances to access green finances for household projects, says Standard Bank homeowners’ advice and services platform LookSee executive head Marc du Plessis.
JSE-registered real estate investment trust (REIT) Liberty Two Degrees (L2D) is beefing up its electricity generation supply to meet its environment, social and governance (ESG) targets. L2D development executive Melinda Isaacs says the company – which specialises in rental property in the retail, hotel and office space, with a portfolio valued at over R10-billion – is focusing on sustainability projects that have a good return on investment and will reduce operational expenditure.
The commercial property market experienced a 5.6% decline in sales activity in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the same quarter in 2022, owing to numerous factors, including rising interest rates and the oversupply of office space, says property valuations custodian South African Institute of Valuers (SAIV) president Dianne de Wet. “I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of the interest rate increases as this takes time to filter through and I believe that we may see another interest rate increase soon, even if it’s just a 25-basis point increase. There’s also the risk of the decline in vacancy rates being arrested,” notes De Wet.
The fire at the Vodacom building at Century City in Cape Town last month is suspected of having been caused by an issue with the rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) installation, notes ASP Fire CEO Michael van Niekerk, observing that such systems for homes and businesses are increasingly popular as a means of mitigating the impact of ongoing loadshedding. However, he stresses that, for insurance purposes, these systems need to be installed by an accredited installer or electrician. The onus is on home and business owners to ensure that the installation is correct, especially in terms of accompanying generator sets.
South Africa currently has a shortfall of trained and experienced wind energy technicians, after having lost much of its skilled capacity to advanced international markets and, like its international counterparts, it needs a growing pool of qualified candidates to draw from as demand for new power generation grows. The shortfall is a direct result of the interrupted procurement that has plagued the sector since 2014, says onshore wind turbines manufacturer Nordex Energy South Africa people and culture head Zelrese Brair.
To unlock the estimated R235-billion in investment required to strengthen and expand the grid in a way that positions it to connect the 53 GW of new generation capacity that will be required by the early 2030s, a new consultation paper has been published making the case for South Africa to consider alternative funding models, including off-balance sheet financing. Titled ‘Better Finance, Better Grid’, the paper’s lead authors are Professor Mark Swilling and Erica Johnson, of the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University, and it has been published jointly by CST, the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies and the Blended Finance Taskforce, with support from the Open Society Foundations.
For South Africa to be energy secure by 2032, it needs to bring 53 GW of electricity into the energy system, which, in turn, requires 14 000 km of new transmission lines to be built in a decade.
The current transmission building capacity, however, is about 400 km/y, Stellenbosch University Centre for Sustainability Transitions junior researcher Alboricah Rathupetsane pointed out this week.
Investment solutions company Novare, which has a substantial property portfolio in Africa, on August 1 announced a significant investment in rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels as an eco-friendly and renewable energy source to curb carbon emissions across its African property portfolio and strengthen its sustainability drive. The first phase of this solar project focuses on Matola Mall, one of Novare’s retail properties in Mozambique, in collaboration with renewable energy company Enteria Moçambique.
Eskom Holdings =has imposed conditions to access the national grid on 1 850 MW worth of projects in South Africa that developers including Karpowership and Electricite de France SA have struggled to complete since they were awarded in March 2021. The right to access the grid is “conditional based on the projects achieving certain milestones by December 2023,” Eskom said on Wednesday in a response to queries. “This is in line with Eskom’s objective to have projects connect to the grid as soon as possible and to discourage capacity hogging.”
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