• The town with a solar-powered airport has plans to construct three solar power plants.
• Western Cape Premier detailed how the province is lessening its reliance on Eskom for energy.
• This includes solutions such as power packs being distributed to indigent households.

This week, President Cyril Ramaphosa revealed that Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa would be the recently announced Minister of Electricity.

While government published regulations regarding the National State of Disaster, little has been said about how government will address the energy crisis. On Thursday Premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde, outlined how his government was addressing the crisis.

During his second Energy Digicon, Winde was joined by Executive Mayor of George, Alderman Leon Van Wyk, as well as Special Advisor on Energy, Alwie Lester. These digicons are meant to promote transparency of government to citizens.

“All our citizens deserve transparency around all our efforts to combat the energy crisis. Everything we have at our disposal needs to be considered to end this crisis,” Winde said.

The Premier criticised Ramaphosa’s decision to appoint Ramakgopa as Minister of Electricity but said that he was willing to work with him “to end this crisis”.

But what other plans does the Western Cape Government have to end loadshedding.

In order to reduce the negative impact loadshedding has, the provincial government is implementing an Energy Resilience plan. This should help to reduce reliance on Eskom for energy through a range of short-, medium-, and long-term measures.

These include:

• Loadshedding Relief Programme – this will amongst others see emergency packs consisting of power packs distributed to indigent households;
• Provincial Integrated Resource Plan – this includes a basket of options including green and alternative energy sources;
• Demand Side Management Programme – the public needs to play its part in taking the strain off of the power grid by reducing power usage wherever they can, but crucially this has to be aligned around incentivizing and rewarding actions taken to reduce usage;
• New Emergency Generation Programme;
• Network Development Programme.

The George Mayor also highlighted some ways the municipality is shifting its energy reliance.

This includes generating 3MW of power and reducing consumption by as much as 4MW.

More notably, George wants to commission three solar power plants that would come online between 2023 and 2025. It’s worth remembering that George Airport became the first solar powered airport on the African continent in 2016.

The municipality commissioning the construction of three new solar power plants then is a great idea and we have every confidence that the goal will be met.

The George Municipality is also creating a battery storage facility. All of these should help cushion residents from “several stages of power cuts”.

Other municipalities in the Western Cape are also said to be working on their own energy resilience plans.

“Our municipalities have been hard at work drawing up their own energy plans. We must confront this disaster both at provincial government and local government levels. It is only by working together through partnerships that we will be able to end the blackouts,” said Winde.

You can watch the full Energy Digicon in the video below.

[Source – South African Government][Image – Markus Spiske on Unsplash]