Last week we joined Huawei in Cape Town as the company announced the local availability of its latest smart PV solar solutions for residential customers.

While it is indeed focusing on the South African household and home owners, Huawei also gave us the opportunity to see how a commercial project it was involved in has benefited a local business.

This brings us to Fairview Wine and Cheese Farm, which is located in the Paarl region of the Western Cape. Four years ago, the owners of this business decided to invest into a solar project, with the team at Emergent Energy providing a solution that leveraged inverters from Huawei. These are similar to the inverters that Huawei has implemented onto its own campus in Johannesburg, although a little bit older.

At Fairview we got the chance to speak to Emergent Energy’s head of project development, Natasha Watkins-Baker, who explained how this two-phase multi-year project was implemented, as well as what return on investment it has yielded for the Farm owners to date.

First she noted that the cheese production side of the business was the first to begin the project, delivering a year’s worth of data and insights, serving as a proof of concept to go ahead and move over to the wine aspect of operations a year later.

Over the combined four period, with the project first kicking off in 2018, it has saved Fairview an estimated R6.2 million. The project has almost paid for itself, with Watkins-Baker noting that in total it cost roughly R6.5 million to bring to fruition.

With these systems capable of lasting a few decades provided they are properly maintained, it represents a potentially massive saving for the Farm down the line.

Gleaning a bit more insight from Watkins-Baker, she explained that this project is a bit unique to some of the more recent ones being undertaken in the region. This as it was not a Power Purchase Agreement, but she did note that those are becoming more common given the Western Cape government’s positive outlook when it comes to renewable energy projects.

She also said that there has been little in the form of push back from the local municipality, as projects like this open up the scope for electricity to reach others as the Farm is less dependent on the national power grid.

During the plenary session of last week’s Solar Power Africa 2023 conference, the municipality outlined its commitment to bring more of these projects to the fore in the coming years.

Huawei, for its part, is looking to play the role of facilitator too, working with an existing network of partners specialising in solar PV installation and management.

Many of these partners were also on hand at Fairview, including ACDC Dynamics, Mustek, and others, so it is clear that Huawei aims to assist when it comes the solar technology aspect of such endeavours.

With President Cyril Ramaphosa announcing a National State of Disaster at SONA last week, the energy crisis shows no signs of wavering, but projects like this serve as an example of what can be implemented from a commercial/enterprise perspective. The savings alone, speak to why solar should be a consideration for many local businesses and operations.