Massive untapped solar radiation advantage of Africa – click for numbers
This positive report on the opportunities for Renewable Energy in South Africa is a starting point for a series of posts that will report on developments in and linked to the use of Renewable Energy in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Where is Renewable Energy Going in South Africa?
An almost ten fold growth in revenue from renewable energy is predicted by business research and consulting firm Frost and Sullivan’s. This emerges from their Southern African Renewable Energy Equipment Market analysis, which sees the current renewable industry in South Africa having revenues of only $28.4 million in 2008 but projects a growth to over $250 million by 2015.Analyst Sipha Ndawonde said “The growth of the wind power market and large-scale solar concentrating projects will be driven by an increasing number of joint ventures.” He sees the driver of this growth being the “feed-in tariffs” the South African National Energy Regulator (NERSA) announced in March and currently investigating expanding. The current tariffs of 13.8 cents per kilowatt hour for wind energy and 23.6 cent per kilowatt hour for concentrated solar are considered to be amongst the best in the world
This with the government’s target of 10 terawatt hours of renewable energy by 2013, seems to make the rapid growth in renewable energy almost inevitable.
What Supports The Growth?
As well as the feed-in tariffs the report believes that “An abundance of natural resources combined with a stable political environment, reasonable economic growth rates and growing interest from private equity firms means that large-scale RE projects are set to penetrate into the southern African countries of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia.”
Additionally South Africa has an opportunity opened up by the fact that Eskom, the government electricity generator, was running into supply constraints at the start of 2008, that called for rolling blackouts. A very serious situation was only avoided by the economic downturn which brought a decrease in demand. This is therefore South Africa’s opportunity to ensure that renewables are part of the accelerated build programme Eskom are having to undertake.
What Constrains the Growth?
But there are other less positive issues that are effecting the growth of renewables in South Africa – these include the fact that the government target of 10 terawatt hours was set in 2003, that the take up of solar heating is lower than projected, solar electricity projects don’t seem to get off the ground, transport fuels projects have been halted by the “food for fuel” issue and the world economic crisis.
Eskom’s position as a long time, coal based supplier of electricity and the low calculated cost of that electricity appear to constrain development. There is pressure to move the Renewable Energy Power Purchase Agency (REPA) out of Eskom’s Single Buyers Office where it is currently housed to avoid any negative effects on the development of the industry.
Following How Things Develop
The way renewable energy develops in South Africa and Africa in general is probably going to be a long, interesting and complex story. The author will be posting smaller but focused stories on the issues and actions in the growth of renewable energy in Africa and South Africa in particular. Follow these in Ecolocalizer or on the author’s post page and use comments to make suggestions or observations.
Map from http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/ via Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.
To me, so far, the only thing “driving the growth of “renewable energy”" appears to be the Energy put into senseless machinery which we are told is “makes renewable energy” (whatever THAT might be) – by all the old energy sources that it is supposed to be replacing.
Meanwhile, I continue to point-out that we do not have to tolerate the several hundred years of waiting which a “Moder wind turbine” takes to produce enough energy to enable another to be made, because it is readily possible to get several WHOLE percent of cost returned, per annum, from a sensible design – OF ABOUT THE RIGHT SIZE. The pennies just do not appear to have dropped into the requisite minds to waken them – probably to physical reality in general, but in particular the fact that the cost of any given “windfarm” is a necklace-shaped function of the Diameter of the TADs employed. This is because the cost of 4 T urbines of half the diameter, is half that of the One big one, whilst the cost of 4
A lternators of 1/4 the thro’put is double that of the One big one.
Lowest cost to do the job is for sizes where the T bill is about the same as the A bill. This happens at around 1 metre diameter.