Small town, big ambition
Out of sight and out of mind for most of its existence, one of SA’s smallest and most remote municipalities is reaching out to the world to take full advantage of its central location in the country’s fast growing solar electricity generation industry.
Made up of a small town and six villages in the Northern Cape, much of what is happening in !Kheis is the result of its own ambition.
!Kheis aims to become the first municipal area in SA to go off the national electricity grid. By using renewable energy and energy efficiency, the municipality plans to give as many as possible of its 17 000 citizens access to electricity and water, and to make life more bearable in an arid area where temperatures soar to 45o and many people are forced to sleep outside to escape the excessive heat in their homes.
Just as much of what is happening in !Kheis is due to the way in which organisations far and wide have responded to its calls for support, and specifically to the highly proactive approach taken by a solar developer to invest a portion of its revenue in social and economic development initiatives in the area.
!Kheis is centred on the town of Groblershoop (population of 9 000) on the banks of the Orange River about 120 km southeast of Upington.
Because it has one of the highest solar irradiation rates in the world, the Northern Cape has attracted the bulk of solar photovoltaic (PV) and all of the concentrated solar power (CSP) investment under government’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), which enables private sector developers to sell electricity to the national grid through a bidding process.
A chain of solar power stations already established in the Northern Cape form the building blocks of a solar corridor which government hopes to broaden by establishing a large-scale solar park through a public-private partnership.
The Northern Cape provincial government plans to have much of the province designated as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) which would offer the private sector a range of incentives to establish solar component manufacturing operations employing as many local people as possible.
One of the most advanced of the solar plants in the Northern Cape, the ACWA Power Bokpoort CSP plant, is being developed in !Kheis, while several other solar developers are considering or planning plants in the area.
Developed by Saudi-based ACWA Power with SA partners and scheduled to start supplying the grid early next year, the 50MW plant has nine hours of thermal energy storage — among the highest in the world — enabling it to generate electricity through much of the night and specifically during peak periods when the grid is under severe pressure.
!Kheis began to appreciate the potential of renewable energy and energy efficiency at least a year before the announcement of the ACWA Power Bokpoort CSP project.
Municipal manager Teresa Scheepers and colleagues attended the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP 17 conference in Durban in 2011 and decided that they wanted to use green technologies to extend universal access to services, particularly, as she describes it, to “the poorest of the poor”.
By the time construction started on the Bokpoort plant the municipality had already adopted what Scheepers calls a “green” Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
“We decided to work smarter,” says Scheepers. “We said that if the power plant was going to utilise the sun’s energy to sell electricity to Eskom and make lots of money, then we should look at small innovations to meet the needs of the poorest of the poor and make sure that our people also thrive.”
Like all renewable energy developers contracted under the REIPPPP, the Bokpoort project was contractually bound to invest 6,7% of its total revenue over a 20-year period to support social and economic development in communities within a 50 km radius of the plant.
With construction of a solar power plant taking between 18 months and three years, this means that communities must wait for lengthy periods before projects connect to the national grid and start earning money to invest in social and economic development.
“In our first meeting with Bokpoort [project team], I made a three-hour presentation of our green IDP and explained that we wanted to start meeting our people’s most basic needs. I explained, for example, that we did not want to install solar water heaters because most people do not have water in their homes. We asked Bokpoort to first assist us to supply electricity to shacks in the Duineveld township in Groblershoop,” says Scheepers.
“Another theme in our meeting with Bokpoort was that we wanted them to support us to train our people and give them skills to enable them to work and provide services to projects in the Solar Corridor and the SEZ.”
Duineveld was a priority for good reason. Walls of shacks there are built using reeds from the Orange River and plastered with mud, on top of which are zinc roofs. Many shacks have burnt down through the use of paraffin and candles, often leaving residents destitute, while zinc roofs make temperatures inside shacks unbearable in summer.
Under no obligation to undertake community development projects during the 30month construction period, Bokpoort CSP nevertheless decided to allocate R5m for immediate investment, becoming one of only a few of the 92 projects under the REIPPPP to invest in community development before earning revenue.
“When a new investor comes into an area, there is great disruption with new people and heavy traffic coming into the community,” says ACWA Power head of human resources & socioeconomic development in Southern Africa Mbuso Mbatha.
“People see a mega-project coming to their area and great expectations are raised. They see their lives changing. We could offer only a limited number of jobs to local people