Household appliance manufacturer Electrolux South Africa (SA) has embarked on a journey to no longer make use of electricity from the national grid and to use solar energy to power its operations. As a result, the organisation is confident of cutting the carbon footprint of its local Kwikot water heater (geyser) manufacturing plant by 40%.
The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the privately-owned Kelvin Power Station to increase electricity supply for the city by 100 MW. CoJ executive mayor Mpho Moerane signed the PPA on October 8 alongside Gauteng Premier David Makhura and CoJ Environment and Infrastructure Services Department executive council member Tania Oldjohn at the City Power headquarters, in Booysens.
Africa is on the cusp of a transition into a new energy paradigm, one in which technological and commercial innovation is delivering increasingly decentralised power to the continent in new ways, says consultancy Kearney.
Kearney has outlined in a white paper, the overarching strategic considerations for African utilities to forge a path to sustainability against the backdrop of this global paradigm shift.
The South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (Sacci’s) business confidence index (BCI) declined to 91 in September after having registered its highest level this year to date of 97 in May. The level of 91 in September, nevertheless, reflects a better business confidence level than the pre-Covid level of 89.9 in March 2020, Sacci notes.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has doubled down on his argument that South Africa needs to act with “urgency and ambition” in transitioning to a low-carbon economy, but stressed that such increased ambition could not be achieved without financial support from developed economies. In his latest weekly newsletter, the President backs moves to raise grants and loans, at concessional rates, from the international community to support the country’s and Eskom’s just transition.
A number of energy experts, academics and researchers view offshore wind as the answer to help South Africa decrease its carbon emissions by over 40% by 2025. “The wind market in South Africa is currently focussed on onshore wind, because we have the land space available and it is cost competitive, which means almost all of our members are developing onshore wind.
Eskom has refuted a statement issued by the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) Greater Johannesburg Region branch over an apparent power-purchase agreement between the city and the state-owned power utility. In Friday’s statement, the ANC said Mayor Mpho Moerane had signed an agreement that will allow the city to take over power supply to areas such as Soweto, Orange Farm and Ivory Park.
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).
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