According to the head of an office that purchases power from private producers, a lack of electrical grid connections is a significant obstacle that needs to be overcome as South Africa attempts to increase the generation capacity required to stop record outages.
Since 2008, the country has experienced periodic blackouts as a result of the state utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.’s inability to fulfil demand from a fleet of unreliable coal-fired plants that are prone to failure.
The crisis has been addressed by the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, in a number of ways over the past year, including doubling the amount of wind energy the country buys from private contractors to 3,200 megawatts in a recent round of bids. However, none of those projects were chosen because they couldn’t be connected.
Bernard Magoro, head of the Independent Power Producers office, stated at a conference in Cape Town that additional new projects need grid access and that speedy approval procedures are necessary to fill a capacity gap of roughly 6,000 megawatts needed to stabilize the system.
According to Magoro, the office has been collaborating with Eskom to find solutions to blockages and would only launch another round of bids to purchase additional electricity from private suppliers once grid concerns have been resolved.
Without going into further detail, he stated that a scheme to acquire 3,000 megawatts of gas-fired electricity is currently encountering challenges at the ports, which will receive the fuel and house the generation plants.
According to Magoro, bids for 513 megawatts of storage capacity will be filed in July, and a different government procurement procedure for batteries is anticipated to take place soon. businesstech