- The Western Cape government under Premier Alan Winde is embarking on a new initiative to spare some of its municipalities from blackouts through wide-ranging solar PV battery deployments.
- Municipalities will have to meet certain criteria before they receive the batteries.
- Winde says Western Cape is working hard to be South Africa’s first province to beat Eskom’s power outages.
Amid the worst power outages in South Africa’s history, the country’s wealthiest provinces are scrambling to figure out ways to reduce loadshedding and save businesses.
Earlier this month Gauteng embarked on a mass drive to upskill youths to install and maintain solar energy technology as it goes forward with plans to install more solar panels on public infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the government of the Western Cape says it is on track to end blackouts across the province.
In a press statement, Premier Alan Winde shared his government’s plan to “end power blackouts” through the installation of solar photovoltaic (PV) batteries in strategic locations across the Western Cape’s municipalities.
“Our aim with this project is to pilot how we can speedily install containerized solar PV cells with battery storage in these municipalities which would stop loadshedding in these towns,” said Winde.
Winde’s government says that in order for a municipality to be considered to take part in the solar PV initiative, it has to meet “specific criteria.”
While the Premier didn’t elaborate on what these criteria were, the press statement does go on to say that municipality mayors and their teams gave presentations to the Western Cape’s energy council for consideration.
The final list of municipalities that will be receiving the solar PV cells will be announced in June after a round of “final interrogations” take place.
Western Cape government says that above this final list of areas, it is working with five other municipalities to help them become loadshedding free through the Municipal Energy Resilience (MER) programme.
“Rolling blackouts are unfortunately likely to worsen as we move into winter and our goal as the WCG is to protect as many residents and businesses as possible from the severity of these blackouts,” adds Winde.
“We are looking forward to working with our first phase of local municipalities to make sure that they have electricity systems in place so that when loadshedding starts, municipalities can use a different source of power, like solar PV panels, batteries and more.”
He says that the Western Cape is “working hard to become the first province to beat loadshedding.”
Last year, Winde’s government spent R46 million to install solar panels across some of the province’s schools in efforts to ease loadshedding on learners.
At the provincial capital, and second largest city in South Africa – Cape Town – Western Cape government is looking to take over the supply of electricity to its metros that are served by Eskom.
Cape Town supplies 70 percent of its own power, while the other 30 percent of areas are supplied by the state utility. Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis wants to take over this other 30 percent.
“We want to supply the entire city,” he told Bloomberg.
Reportedly, Cape Town requires a peak supply of 1 700MW in the winter, and 1 600MW in the summer.
The city has plans to remove the first four stages of loadshedding, and it has managed to remove two stages from its regions via additional supply from a hydropower plan it operates.
Negotiations between Cape Town and Eskom are in a “delicate” stage right now and no concrete decisions have been made.
Loadshedding from Eskom is expected to hit its all-time height during the winter months when Stage 8 is feared to be implemented.
No doubt the economic toll of these outages will be enormous, hence why provincial governments are rushing to save businesses and households.
