Province unveils municipalities for direct energy procurement
SEVEN municipalities across the province, including the City, have been named as candidates to participate in the first phase of the province’s municipal energy resilience (MER) project, according to Finance and Economic Opportunities MEC David Maynier.
The other municipalities are Drakenstein, Mossel Bay, Overstrand, Saldanha Bay, Stellenbosch and Swartland.
The MER initiative, which was unveiled in 2020, has been established to enable the development of municipal energy projects in the province in line with recent changes to the country’s energy regulations, empowering municipalities to purchase energy directly from independent power producers (IPPs) and/or to develop their own generation facilities.
Maynier said: “Now that the candidate municipalities have been announced, we will be confirming willingness and commitment through a memorandum of understanding, and then working closely with them in the first phase of the MER project to identify pioneering energy projects and develop a roadmap to roll out the projects.”
Maynier said: “Any learnings from projects implemented with the candidate municipalities will be applied to future projects in other municipalities.
“While this project should enable municipalities to be able to buffer residents and businesses from the impacts of load shedding, they will still continue to be connected to the national grid as we won’t be able to meet 100% of energy demand through renewable energy at this stage.”
Maynier said the province would work closely with the national government to explore how the new energy regulations could lead to renewable energy generation projects in municipalities.
Meanwhile, the main municipal building in George will have completed the installation of a 300 kilowatt peak grid tied PV generating plant at the officials’ parking area within the next three months.
Mayor Leon van Wyk said: “The 500 000 kilowatt-hour of electricity that the PV plant will generate annually is the equivalent of the power consumption of 55 households using 25 kwh of electricity per day.”
He said: “In overall terms this represents just over 0.1% of the municipality’s total annual sales of almost 500 million kwh of electricity.”