Cape Town - The private sector is willing to spend hundreds of millions of rand on building new sections of South Africa’s national electricity grid to enable renewable energy power plants to come online.
And it would do it at half the cost and in half the time, according to SA Wind Energy Association (Sawea) board member Hein Reyneke.
Reyneke said at a media briefing at the Windaba wind energy conference in the city on Wednesday that Eskom did not have the money to build the extra transmission capacity that would be needed to connect all the renewable energy projects to the grid in the long term.
“From our perspective, independent power producers are more than willing to pay. We will do it at half the cost and in half the time.”
In South Africa many of the areas where there were good wind resources were in remote areas, not close to Eskom’s grid. The places where there were both good winds and which were close to the national grid had been taken in the earlier part of the renewable energy programme.
Reyneke, who works for a renewable energy company, said while connecting renewable energy plants to the grid would not be a problem in the short term, it would be within five years.
The electricity grid was a strategic asset to the country and it was the responsibility of Eskom to operate and maintain it.
“Independent power producers are saying ‘we will build the grid’. Discussions on how we do it, how we pay, are happening, but the rules of the game are not in place yet. But from the private sector and from Eskom there is a willingness to make it work. Eskom has money issues, we all know about that, so instead of them paying, we pay,” Reyneke.
Asked about the cost, he said building distribution infrastructure would be in the region of tens of millions of rand, while it would cost hundreds of millions of rand to build transmission infrastructure.
Killian Hagemann, outgoing chair of the Sawea’s technical working group, said one of the problems that needed to be solved was the disadvantage of the private sector’s “first mover” - the company who paid to build the grid in a remote area.
Hagemann said if this cost the company R500m, it would mean it would have to sell its electricity at around 80c a kilowatt hour to recoup the grid cost. With the latest price around 71c a kilowatt hour, the company would price itself out of the market.
“So for the first mover there is a cost. How do we take that disadvantage out of the equation?”
Karén Breytenbach head of the Department of Energy’s independent power producers’ office, said connectivity to the national grid for renewable energy project in the future was “an issue”.
“There is no doubt about it. We have taken all the low hanging fruit and going forward we will have to work out how to address the grid issue....We are looking at the grid with Eskom,” Breytenbach said.
IOL
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