Western Cape Premier Alan Winde on Friday highlighted that his administration had assigned R7-billion, over the next three years, to create an “ecosystem” that would facilitate private sector investment in renewable electricity generation capacity in the province. He was addressing the inaugural Wesgro Business Outlook conference in Cape Town. (Wesgro is the Western Cape’s trade, investment and tourism promotion agency.)

The Western Cape’s energy demand currently totalled 4 000 MW. The provincial government was targeting the creation of new generating capacity totalling 5 700 MW. This was to allow for, and power, economic growth.

“Never waste a crisis! We are definitely not wasting this crisis!” asserted Winde. “The massive opportunity we’ve got is the carbon footprint we have here …. is going to change drastically. This crisis is going to be used to the absolute maximum.”

A key aim of the provincial energy initiative was to reduce its carbon footprint (which would also reduce the country’s carbon footprint). This would protect its exports from the danger of other countries imposing constraints, based on South Africa’s use of greenhouse-gas-creating coal-generated electricity.

Winde reaffirmed his concern about turbine maintenance delays at the Koeberg nuclear power plant, the only major power plant located in the province. Should both of Koeberg’s generating turbine systems have to be offline at the same time, it would have serious consequences for the province, as all the country’s other baseload electricity generating plants were situated in the north of the country. (There are issues with Koeberg’s reactors.)

“Hindsight is the perfect science,” he noted, before confessing that, looking back, he now thought there were things, regarding energy sources for the province, that they should have pressed harder on. Cape Town was on a lower loadshedding (rotating, scheduled power cuts) schedule than the rest of the country, because of actions taken years ago. But, even so, there were things that they should have pushed harder on. Now, they had to push harder.

He cautioned that developing major new renewable energy projects took time. A large solar energy plant could take two years to build and be plugged into the energy grid.