Mainstream Renewable Power SA: Renewables is the only way forward for South Africa
One of the country’s biggest producers of renewable energy says the country must use its vast wind and solar resources to rapidly decarbonise
The world is moving away from fossil fuels. South Africa, if it doesn’t want to be left behind, must take advantage of its solar and wind resources and invest in a mass rollout of renewable energy. This is according to Hein Reyneke, General Manager of Mainstream SA, which builds solar and wind farms in South Africa.
Mainstream’s developed wind farms produce 750MW of wind power and 100MW of solar. “We regard ourselves as the biggest developer in the market. We’ve got a pipeline of over 8GW of wind and solar projects in development across the whole country,” says Reyneke.
Mainstream was one of the first companies to take up the government’s call for renewable energy bidders in 2011, and has been at the forefront of developing clean energy in South Africa for over 10 years.
The company has a global footprint and at first, Mainstream relied on that international experience. But today, there are about 100 people employed by Mainstream, and all of them are South African.
A wind farm can take up to five years to develop, Reyneke says. The environmental approvals and studies that need to be conducted can be onerous: from about a year’s worth of bird and bat studies, to water usage licenses and archaeological and heritage studies, developing a wind farm is a “huge undertaking”, he says.
A solar farm requires slightly fewer impact assessments and takes less time to develop.
Once the wind or solar farm has been developed, the electricity needs to make its way onto Eskom’s national electricity grid. Currently, the renewables sector builds a lot of its own infrastructure to make sure this happens, according to Reyneke.
“If you drive between Cape Town and Johannesburg, you will see these (power) lines running for thousands and thousands of kilometres. So, we break those lines, we build a new substation right next to it and bring those lines into the new substation. We bring our energy into the new substation, and it basically creates a multiplug in the middle of nowhere,” he explains.
It’s not cheap. Sub-stations like these can cost anywhere between R300-500 million, Reyneke says.
Once a project is developed, it needs a buyer. And once the tendering phase is over, construction begins. This takes anything from 12-18 months for solar, and about two years for wind.
“Some of our projects started development in 2010 or 2011 and they are still in development. We’re just waiting for the opportunity to take them to the market and raise the finance for them.”
It is nothing compared to the cost and time it takes to build a fossil fuel project such as a coal power station. And, of course, with zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Renewable energy is also a lot cheaper than energy produced by fossil fuels. Five years ago, in the last government procurement programme known as the expedited round, the price of electricity produced by wind and solar was 62 cents per kilowatt hour — cheaper than any other kind of electricity on the market. Reyneke says this number will continue to decline.
The renewables sector’s development is being accelerated by changes to the law that will allow private companies to build their own power plants of up to 100MW, without a license. Mainstream has been engaging with large private energy consumers in South Africa for several years. The market is ready now to see a rapid expansion of industrialscale private market energy sales from wind and solar plants. It is by far the most cost competitive for electricity consumers, with inflation or less cost increases guaranteed for the duration of the supply contract. This gives big users of electricity cheaper than market electricity with no risk of the above inflation increases we have seen the past decade.
“There’s just no other choice but mass renewable energy rollout in South Africa for the next two decades. We’re not going to build more coal, we’re not going to build more nuclear; the government can’t finance it,” he says.
“Europe is making very aggressive movements to be carbon neutral by 2050. As one of South Africa’s biggest export markets, the country will have to drastically cut down its carbon emissions,” Reyneke says. “As a longer-term future-proofing of our global positioning as a country in the export markets, we need to decarbonise rapidly.”
Reyneke isn’t optimistic about the prospects for gas here either. South Africa simply does not have the infrastructure for it, he says. “What we do have is world-class solar resources and worldclass wind resources. We should just get going and use them.”