V&A Waterfront to commission R184m desalination plant early 2024

JSE-listed Growthpoint Properties and the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), equal joint owners of the Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront in Cape Town, will be commissioning a R184 million desalination plant in the precinct in March and April next year.

At full capacity, it will enable the Waterfront to go off the water grid.

David Green, the chief executive of the V&A Waterfront, confirmed the desalination plant is scalable and could provide between 3.5 million and five million litres of water per day.

Read:
Growthpoint taps desalination to ensure V&A water supply [Apr 2019]
Cape Town’s V&A to get new desalination plant for water needs [Nov 2021]

“It’s a reverse osmosis system and, if it is operating at full capacity, it would effectively take all the Waterfront developments off grid,” he said.

Estienne de Klerk, the South African CEO of Growthpoint Properties, said this would be “quite a landmark achievement” when it happens.

City of Cape Town dispute

Green added that the current dispute between the City of Cape Town and Quality Filtration Systems (QFS) over the tender for a desalination plant at the Waterfront, which is heading to arbitration in 2024, will not impact the Waterfront.

Green said this dispute relates to emergency measures the City of Cape Town tried to rapidly contract several years ago when the city was heading for ‘Day Zero’ because of acute water shortages.

He said the Waterfront granted the city a rent-free lease over a portion of the land for as long as they wanted to use it.

Green said this portion of land was a car park that did not have high utilisation and had access to the sea, but they took the land back when the city ceased to have any requirement for it.

Read:
Cape Town gets first desalinated water as dam levels drop again [May 2018]
Cape Town scraps desalination barge plan as water crisis eases [Jun 2018]

De Klerk stressed that the V&A Waterfront is not party to that dispute, and the site leased to the city was always a temporary arrangement.

“The temporary desalination plant has been removed. That site, which is very close to where our desalination plant has been erected, has been cleared and will be earmarked for other developments that we are contemplating in that area,” he said.

Mitigating water shortages 

Green said the investment in the desalination plant is being made to mitigate the risk to the investments made in the Waterfront precinct because of water shortages.

“Our stance is that because we are owners of the land, we have got significant built installations and can take a longer-term view and ensure we get a commercial yield on this investment because we can produce the desalinated water cheaper than the prevailing rate that the city would charge.

“It’s part of a strategy that gives resilience to the operations, whether they be tourist or commercial operations.

“The biggest threat from the water crisis was the economic threat and that we lost our tenants and lost the jobs in tourism,” he said.

Read: Cape water crisis highlights larger challenge for property owners and developers

Green said this strategy had prompted the water supply to the precinct, which also has full generator backup across all hotels, restaurants, and retail outlets.

He said there is a 20MW power supply plant at the Waterfront to keep all the operations going, which is part of a resilience strategy.

“It is uncertainty that kills business. So we’ve taken a position that says there is absolute certainty during load shedding there will be backup operations.”

Backup solutions

Green said between R40 million and R50 million has been invested over the years in electricity backup facilities at the Waterfront, but there is ongoing investment to refine these facilities.

He said that although there are 48 diesel generators at the Waterfront, with another three currently being installed, they are replacing some of the existing generators and integrating them into a smart system.

“When load shedding gets up to very high levels, trying to replenish the diesel in all of these different generators is a problem,” he added.

“So the biggest advance is that we are going to have three centralised tanks in different areas in the precinct, which will have automatic bousing systems to supply and centralise the diesel into large tanks and then bowse the diesel to the various generators.”

Green said the generators have been supplemented with emergency standby power (ESP) battery packs.

“The next thing we are doing is reduce the diesel consumption by using our solar [energy installations] in conjunction with a battery array.

“By the time we are done, we will have invested between R40 million to R50 million in solar and that will get us to maybe 15% or 20% of the entire consumption of the Waterfront.

“We’re quite a way off in terms of going off the electricity grid, but in terms of backup, we’re pretty much immune up to Level 6 load shedding, and we will trade without any impact up to Level 6,” he said.

Doubling solar

De Klerk said Growthpoint Properties doubled its rooftop solar capacity last year and plans to add a further 30MW this year, which will increase the group’s total rooftop solar capacity to about 40MW.

He said a lot of work on energy is being done in the group, and rolling out solutions is a key component of that.

De Klerk said all of Growthpoint’s office buildings have generators, and many of its shopping centres have generating capacity other than solar.

Growthpoint reported in September this year it had become the first party to wheel renewable electricity in the City of Cape Town in collaboration with licensed electricity trader Etana Energy.

Read: Historic first for Growthpoint as it wheels electricity in Cape Town

Wheeling is a process where electricity is bought and sold between private parties, using the existing grid to transport power from where it is generated to end-users that can be long distances apart.

As part of this wheeling pilot project, solar energy generated at Growthpoint’s Constantia Village shopping centre in Constantia is being exported into Cape Town’s electricity grid for use at Growthpoint’s 36 Hans Strijdom office building in the Foreshore, the home of Investec and Ninety One.

De Klerk said this was a test project to see if wheeling works and how effectively it can be administered with the municipality through the trader.

“That is part of a much larger energy initiative we are looking at,” he said.

De Klerk said Growthpoint has invested in excess of R500 million into electricity projects linked to its portfolio of property assets and, in the current year, will be investing “just over R300 million, so its big capital”.

He estimated the group has also invested close to R100 million in water initiatives.

“So we are becoming utilities as landlords by default,” he said.