South Africa's increasing global role in the renewable energy and gas sectors comes into sharp focus this week as the city hosts four global energy sector events.
Mike Mulcahy, chief executive of GreenCape, said the four “world-class” events to be hosted in Cape Town signified “a groundswell of momentum”.
He noted the country’s dynamism in the energy space already won international acclaim. In 2015, Mulcahy said the ratings agency Moody’s named South Africa the globe’s fastest-growing green economy. Last year, a Bloomberg report also counted the country among the top-10 RE investment destinations in the world.
This year’s Windaba Conference is expanding into a Wind Energy Week and will include an academic conference for the sector named WindAc Africa.
Windaba, which is jointly hosted by the South African Wind Energy Association and the Global Wind Energy Council, runs from November 2-4.
The other two events running this week are the Africa oil and gas week, which started yesterday and runs until November 4, and the annual general meeting of the World Energy Cities Partnership.
Mulcahy noted the Africa oil and gas week was “recognised as a key vehicle for driving Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the energy landscape”.
He said these four events in Cape Town this week reflected the extent to which South Africa, and Cape Town in particular, was emerging as a hub for companies to meet and gain insights to position themselves in a rapidly changing energy sector. The high penetration levels of renewable energy, such as targeted by Windaba 2016, are not only affordable, Mulcahy said, the latest Council for Scientific and Industrial Research modelling showed they were technically possible immediately. Also, combining them with “flexible” technologies such as gas, could overcome concerns over the variability of RE output when the sun sets, or the wind stops blowing.
Mulcahy also referred to modelling done by leading energy scientist Dr Tobias Bischof-Niemz, which showed that gas and renewables could supply 82 percent of South Africa’s needs and yield the cheapest systems cost for electricity generation. Current plans projected the country’s renewable energy capacity increasing to around 17.8GW by 2030 and 3.1GW of gas-fired power generation procured as part of the IPPP. To put these contributions in perspective, he said, neither of these energy sources contributed anything to South Africa’s electricity mix a mere five years ago.