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SA in renewable energy drive

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 17 Apr 2015
The minister of energy, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, says the procurement of renewable energy will be accelerated and expanded.
The minister of energy, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, says the procurement of renewable energy will be accelerated and expanded.

The minister of energy, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, revealed yesterday that the procurement of renewable energy will be accelerated and expanded.

The announcement comes at a time the country is in need of additional capacity, with power utility Eskom failing to keep the lights on.

The latest round of load-shedding started on Sunday and was stepped up during the week when Eskom moved to stage three. This morning, the power utility said the electricity supply system remained constrained and vulnerable due to a shortage of generation capacity.

The South African power system is still coal-driven - 87.4% of net domestic electricity production comes from coal. The contribution of renewables - wind and solar PV - last year was close to 1% (2.2 terawatt-hours, TWh) out of 234TWh in total.

Renewable energy is widely seen as the answer for Eskom to meet demand, and Joemat-Pettersson revealed she intends making a ministerial determination for an additional 6 300MW of renewable energy to be procured, over and above the existing 5 243MWs.

Wind energy projects have been awarded a total of 676MW, spread between five separate projects. A further 415MW has been attributed to solar PV projects, 25MW to biomass and 5MW to hydro power.

Joemat-Pettersson said she "would leave no stone unturned" to ease the energy challenges of the country and thanked the renewable energy industry for its positive attitude in working with government.

The South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA) says in the past it has been implied that wind power will receive about half the allocated MWs.

"By this logic, we're looking at perhaps an additional 2 500 to 3 000MW of wind power and a procurement process that extends another three to four years into the future," says SAWEA CEO Johan van den Berg.

"This, once gazetted, should give comfort to international investors to invest in local factories that can push the local content of wind farms to about 54%. Moreover, the money being put into local community development around wind farms will rise from the present R5 billion over the next 20 years, to at least R10 billion and perhaps much more."

SAWEA notes the 1 121MW granted for this round constitutes an expanded allocation as only around 400MW was originally earmarked for this window.

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