Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Patricia de Lille reported on Thursday that nearly 1 200 applications were received from professionals willing to serve on the Technical Advisory Panel for South Africa’s Infrastructure Investment Plan. Applications for the panel were advertised in August and the Minister said final appointments would be made this week.
State-owned power utility Eskom reports that, on October 2, Unit 2 of its six-unit Kusile coal-fired power station in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga ,achieved full commercial operation status.
This means the unit has progressed from its 16-month project testing phase, to officially becoming a part of Eskom’s generation fleet, contributing its nameplate capacity of up to 800 MW to the South African power grid.
Renewable energy company Distributed Power Africa (DPA) has announced that Royal Bafokeng Holdings (RBH) will invest $20-million in a newly formed asset company to expand on DPA’s solar energy portfolio in four key markets.
RBH is a long-term African community investment holding company with a legacy of partnering with leading organisations to achieve real broad-based transformation.
Paarl-based wine cellars Boland Cellar and peer-to-peer solar leasing platform Sun Exchange received crowd funding from 1 204 individuals from 85 countries to finance a 473 kW solar project to provide clean electricity for the wine cellar, while also reducing its electricity costs and emissions. The crowdsourced and global approach to solar finance was enabled through Sun Exchange’s innovative online platform.
Canadian mining company Robex Resources and Vivo Energy, which sells and distributes Shell- and Engen-branded fuels and lubricants in Africa, have reached an agreement for Vivo Energy to supply solar energy to the Nampala gold mine, in Mali, for a period of five to fifteen years. The project will result in the construction of a 3.9 MW solar photovoltaic power plant, with a battery storage capacity of 2.6 MWh which, owing to the energy management system, will be fully integrated into the mine’s existing thermal power plant.
Although national government has opened the door for municipalities to procure electricity from independent power producers (IPPs), a lot of “regulatory ironing out” still needs to happen before power purchase agreements (PPAs) can be signed.
In May last year, the Energy Minister gave permission for the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) to licence 500 MW of small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) projects, sized between 1 MW and 10 MW, without the need for the Minister to sign it off.
Leading wind-energy project developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are convinced that South Africa’s plan to install 1.6 GW of new wind capacity yearly until 2030 is more than sufficient to attract large-scale industrial investment. These captains of industry warn, however, that the country will need to back-up the policy certainty currently being provided by the Integrated Resource Plan 2019 (IRP2019) with consistent implementation.
Renewables remain the lowest-cost source of new power generation in most parts of the world, with prices continuing to decline and making it a promising sector for development in most countries.
The price of onshore wind, for example, declined from $86/MWh in 2009 to $53/MWh in 2019, representing a 40% decline in the last ten years, states Danish Energy Agency energy adviser Andrea Isidori.
South Africa’s biggest cities are preparing to source their own power after the energy ministry this month approved letting them wean themselves off the state utility that’s subjected cities to outages for the past 13 years.
The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) – which reported a R3.8-billion loss for the 2019/20 financial year, driven by a surge in impairments from R4.8-billion to R9.6-billion – has revised its investment strategy with the aim of “catalysing” government’s Reconstruction and Recovery Plan through risk-sharing partnerships with private and public co-financiers. CEO TP Nchocho stressed that the State-owned development finance institution (DFI) would continue to operate at the “upper end of the risk spectrum” in supporting the plan, announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on October 15 and which included strong infrastructure, industrial, energy and agricultural components.
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