South Africa

The International Energy Agency’s latest “Africa Energy Outlook” report says grids will need to be expanded, along with natural gas exploitation, if everyone in Africa is to have access to electricity by 2030. On the solar front, the document predicts a levelized cost of energy of $0.018/kWh to $0.049/kWh by 2030 – cheaper than wind power or gas.

A large campus in Johannesburg – Vantage Data Centers’ first in Africa – will receive a third of its energy from solar panels.

The Spanish company says it wants to focus only on OECD member states, indicating a withdrawal from Africa. The sale includes a solar farm in the Northern Cape, which has reportedly been affected by module backsheet failures.

Eleven plants are expected to be connected to the grid of national utility Eskom and the other four projects will be linked to municipal networks. The project size ranges from 0.1 MW to 80 MW.

Sola Group plans to build two 100 MW siolar projects in South Africa’s North West province. It will sell the electricity under power purchase agreements to US-based titanium products provider Tronox, which operates several mines and smelters in the region.

The fifth round of South Africa’s REIPPPP scheme was launched in March 2021. The authorities allocated 2.6 GW of renewable energy capacity across 25 projects ranging in size from 75 MW to 140 MW.

The latest global PV installer survey by Germany’s EUPD Research offers a hint of the solar brands which installers, mostly based in Europe, gravitate toward. This year’s report also ventured to South Africa and considered mounting systems for the first time.

South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) has kicked off the sixth round of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Program (REIPPPP). It aims to procure 1 GW of PV and 1.6 GW of wind power.

Only by working together can African nations overcome the obstacles to exploiting their abundant renewables resources and producing affordable green hydrogen – for use at home and in a European economy keen to wean itself off Russian gas, an online event has been told.

The Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA) is seeking consultants for the deployment of 3MW of solar capacity to supply power to the traction system and some stations of the Gautrain system – an 80km railway in Gauteng linking Johannesburg, Pretoria, Ekurhuleni, and the O.R. Tambo International Airport.