South Africa to seek 6.8GW of renewable energy in next 12 months

South Africa plans to launch three procurement rounds for 6.8GW of renewable energy over the next year, as well as a combined 5GW of new coal, gas and storage, a presentation by the ANC showed.

The country is heavily dependent on coal-fired power but plans to move toward a more diversified mix of generation sources. It regularly suffers outages because of faults at ailing state-owned utility Eskom that have deterred investment in the country and hobbled economic growth.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has pledged to fix Eskom and add generation capacity, but progress has been slow.

The presentation, made at a three-day meeting of party officials and allies that ended on Sunday showed the ANC planned to launch the first renewables round in January or February for 2.6GW of wind and solar, with another 2.6GW round in August and a third for 1.6GW in January or February 2022.

A procurement round for roughly 500MW of energy storage would start around September, followed by rounds for 1.5GW of coal and 3GW of gas around December. The coal is contentious as the country is a major polluter, and banks are increasingly reluctant to lend to coal projects because of environmental concerns.

Integrated Resource Plan

An ANC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. An energy ministry spokesman acknowledged receipt of questions but could not immediately comment.

The capacity envisaged by the ANC is in line with the country’s Integrated Resource Plan, a government document that lays out the power mix until 2030. A 2019 update of the plan contained big allocations for wind and solar but also included new coal, which some analysts said was an attempt to placate lobbyists for the fuel.  — Reported by Alexander Winning, (c) 2021 Reuters