The domestic wind industry plans to approach the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) with a series of recommendations for boosting local content and direct South African involvement in the deployment of 4 300 MW of new wind capacity over the coming three years. The proposals focus primarily on embedding greater predictability and flexibility into the procurement rounds, which resumed this year following a seven-year disruption – a pause that resulted in some aspects of the domestic supply-chain, built between 2011 and 2014, being lost.
Load-shedding is back, and with a large chunk of Eskom’s capacity down, the country’s power supply is under a severe strain. On Thursday, after 77 days without load-shedding, Eskom announced that it would resume stage 2, as breakdowns amounted to 14 982 MW, while planned maintenance is 5 334 MW of capacity. Eskom earlier said it expects some of the generating units should return to service in the next few days. Load-shedding will restart at 21:00 on Friday night until 05:00 on Saturday morning.
As South Africa continues on its journey to a greener economy, energy experts who gathered at this year’s Windaba conference, in Cape Town, predict that the country’s future energy mix is likely to include dispatchable power, in the form of hybrid systems. This follows the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy’s (DMRE’s) launch of its technology agnostic Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP) last year, resulting in the renewable energy sector stepping in to develop hybrid energy systems, characterised by a mix of wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), battery energy storage systems (BESS) and dispatchable generation (DG).
Eskom CEO André de Ruyter says there are significant efficiency gains to be made by embracing digitalisation at the State-owned power utility.
Speaking during the second day of the Joburg Indaba on October 7, he unpacked the changing energy provider landscape in South Africa.
With international studies showing that pump systems account for more than 20% of global electrical energy demand, the National Cleaner Production Centre South Africa (NCPC-SA) has worked with more than 450 companies during the past decade, under its flagship Industrial Energy Efficiency Project. One of the project’s offerings, which has been taken up by large energy users, is pump system optimisation (PSO). Pumps comprise a large and integral part of almost every subsector of industry in South Africa and, therefore, provide great opportunity for energy savings, according to the NCPC-SA.
While Kamoa Copper, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is on track to become the second-largest copper mining complex globally, and the biggest in Africa, it is also poised to be among the greenest of copper mines. This is largely on the back of the project being completely powered by hydroelectricity, and the intention to implement a switchover to electric mining vehicles, Kamoa Copper CEO Mark Farren tells Engineering News & Mining Weekly.
South Africa’s struggling state power utility Eskom said it would implement scheduled power cuts from Thursday evening to replenish emergency generation reserves. The “stage 2” power cuts, which requires up to 2,000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid, will be implemented from 9 p.m. local time on Thursday until 5 a.m. on Friday, and again from Friday at 9 p.m. until Saturday at 5 a.m.
Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) executive director Dr Crispian Olver says updating South Africa’s energy policy to exclude any new coal capacity to 2030 and beyond, while increasing the allocation for renewable energy to at least 30 GW by the end of the decade should be key priorities for the coming 24 months. In a presentation delivered at the 2021 edition of Windaba, in Cape Town, Olver said that research had affirmed that a renewables-dominant electricity system would be the lowest-cost for South Africa, as well as the fact that the costs associated with increasing the country’s decarbonisation ambition were not as high as initially expected.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africa stands ready to be a major exporter of green hydrogen and has described the special economic zone (SEZ) proposed for development at Boegoebaai, in the Northern Cape, as a major step towards realising the country’s potential to be a global leader in green hydrogen and derivative products, such as power fuels. In an address to the second Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium, which took place as a hybrid event in Sandton on Thursday, Ramaphosa described green energy more generally as one of the “new frontiers of infrastructure development”.
With final approval for its German factory potentially just weeks away, Tesla’s Elon Musk will make an appearance in the tiny town of Gruenheide this Saturday to host a county fair. Despite pandemic-related curbs limiting gatherings in Germany to under 5 000 people, Tesla applied for – and got – a permit to have 9 000 at the Oct. 9 ‘Giga-Fest’, after local authorities agreed the event would be COVID safe.
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