Lynn Doan and Paul Burkhardt
SOUTH Africa could be a “huge market” for battery storage as rolling blackouts cut power in the continent’s most industrialised economy, Tesla Motors’ chief technology officer JB Straubel said on Monday.
The country had “such a mismatch between demand and supply”, Straubel said at a US Energy Information Administration energy conference in Washington.
“South Africa actually has an electric grid that has huge implications for storage.”
Power utility Eskom, which provides about 95 percent of the country’s power, delayed investing in new generation capacity and is struggling to maintain its existing fleet of power stations.
The utility regularly rotates controlled blackouts in areas for four hours to keep the national grid from collapse, stifling factory production and limiting a recovery in the economy.
South Africa was “a huge market for storage, where we can both effect resiliency, as well as back-up, as well as helping expand the infrastructure to do more”, he said.
Founded in 2003, Tesla – the smallest and youngest publicly held US car maker – is investing heavily in growth as it prepares to begin selling the Model X, a cross-over SUV (sport utility vehicle), later this year. Tesla is increasing production, building its battery factory east of Reno, Nevada, and diversifying beyond cars, with a suite of battery products for homes, businesses and utilities.
Tesla was shipping its Powerwall battery system at a retail price of $350 (R4 331) per kilowatt-hour, Straubel said, adding that that might fall to $100 to $150 by the end of the decade as the costs of manufacturing the batteries declined, just as they had in the solar market.
The batteries would remain cost-prohibitive to most South Africans, where gross domestic product per capita is $6 483 versus $54 597 in the US, according to International Monetary Fund statistics.
Generation from the country’s growing renewable energy sources can depend on weather conditions.
South Africa’s programme for independent power producers of renewable generation including photovoltaic, wind and hydro has procured more than 6 000 megawatts through four bidding rounds since 2011, adding R193 billion of investment in the sector. – Bloomberg