The South African government is set to open new bid windows to procure renewable energy from independent power producers.
Mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe yesterday told Parliament that government will open a bid in July to procure additional renewable energy.
Mantashe, delivering his budget vote speech for the 2023/24 financial year, said Bid Windows 7 and 8 will each give 5 000 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy.
This, as South Africa continues to face critical power shortages, which are further straining the fragile economy.
“The requests for proposals for the procurement of this capacity will be issued to the market in the second and fourth quarter of this financial year, respectively,” said Mantashe.
In addition, he noted, the second and fourth quarters will see further requests for proposals for the procurement of battery storage with a capacity totalling 1 230MW.
According to Mantashe, a request for proposals for the procurement of gas-to-power, totalling 3 000MW, will be issued in the second quarter.
Commenting on Mantashe’s budget vote speech, Niveshen Govender, CEO of renewable energy industry body the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), says: “Public procurement of this magnitude should be weighed up against the value of a consistent pipeline of smaller consecutive bid windows.
“In particular, we would like to see the various stakeholders considering what the best option is to ensure the biggest impact balanced between new generation capacity and socio-economic benefit,” explains Govender.
To ensure success in the public procurement programme, SAWEA calls for a co-ordinated approach, collectively working on various aspects, including regulatory and technical solutions to support the co-location of wind, solar PV and battery energy storage systems; streamlined environmental processes with concessions applied equally; as well as practical and realistic forecasting requirements, all while ensuring grid access and continuous development.
Providing reassurance
Meanwhile, in a statement, the parastatal says it notes with concern various social media posts claiming the country will soon experience a blackout, or collapse of the national electricity grid.
“Eskom refutes these claims and would like to assure South Africans that there are measures in place to avoid the collapse of the power system. Load-shedding is one of these mechanisms,” says Eskom.
The risk of a national blackout, while inherent to the operation of a large power system, has an extremely low likelihood of materialising given the implementation of a number of control measures, including load-shedding, it states.
“The grid is by no means at a higher or imminent risk of a collapse and it would take an unforeseen and sudden sequence of events that results in a cascading collapse of the transmission or generation system, leading to a complete loss of supply across the country.”
According to the power utility, it has robust contingency plans in place to deal with such an eventuality.
At the Enlit Africa conference, in Cape Town yesterday, Eskom interim group chief executive Calib Cassim reiterated there are several controls in place and that he doesn’t lose sleep over the issue.
He said this is due to the confidence in the staff at the system operator, who have had the competence to manage the tight system for the past three years.
“Eskom continues to drive generation recovery initiatives, which are aimed at preventing the current performance from deteriorating in the short-term, and improving the overall performance of the generation fleet in the long-term,” it adds.
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