Kathy Gibson reports – To achieve energy security, South Africa needs to find both short- and long-term measures to counter the current power outages.
Dr Rethabile Melamu, CEO of the South African Photo Voltaic Industry Association (SAPVIA), points out that Africa is still energy-poor, with 600-million people on the continent still without electricity, and about 900-million people without access to clean cooking.
“Without access to energy we will not be able to achieve economic growth in Africa.”
In South Africa, load shedding is used to alleviate an estimated 10GW to 15GW gap between electricity produced and used, which is caused mainly be a maintenance backlog at the utility.
Private investors have so far failed to plug the gap because of a historic lack of incentives for small-scale rooftop installers.
Dr Melamu points out that the country should be phasing out fossil-based power generation, and 10GW of its aging fleet is due for decommissioning – but this will put coal-based communities at risk.
However, climate change issues mean the transition to renewable energy sources is becoming imperative.
To counter the current emergency, renewable energy needs to take a leading role – and it is rising to the occasion.
Melamu says the installed capacity of renewables in South Africa exceeded 1GW in 2020, driven mainly by household and commercial and industrial (C&I) projects.
“We estimate that this year that capacity will double if not triple,” she says. “This will be driven mostly by residential and C&I, but since there is no longer a licence required for embedded generation of any size we have seen increased interest in utility-sized projects.”
Indeed, at the beginning of January the capacity of utility-sized project registered with the regulator was 2,4GW and, in just two months, that number has more than doubled. “There are currenlty 4,6GW of projects underway, some of them online already,” Dr Melamu says.
This gives us some indication of how the quickly the renewables sector is going to progress this year, she adds. “We are in for an interesting time and space in South Africa.”
Commitments from government to help renewables to become an industrialised sector are also encouraging, she says. “We have identified localisation opportunities across the supply chain.”
Industrial players in other sectors, such as automotive, are starting to spot opportunities in renewables and are tooling up to seize the opportunities. “We need to see more of these,” Dr Melamu comments.
In the critical area of skills development, she calls for efforts to attract more young people into renewables space, to be trained and accredited.