By Larry Claasen
The province has created a ‘wheeling toolkit’ to help municipalities connect IPPs to their clients
THE Western Cape launching of its wheeling toolkit, which provides a framework to municipalities to facilitate connections to their electricity grids, late last year is not the only step needed to facilitate energy trading in the province.
The toolkit, which, according to Alwie Lester, special advisor on energy to Western Cape Premier, Alan Winde, provides a template for wheeling agreements between Independent Power Producers (IPP), their customers and the municipalities.
The practice of wheeling, which is sending electricity to and from multiple destinations over a power grid, is seen as key to not only improving the province’s energy resilience but also allowing for competition in the energy sector.
A significant hurdle to this happening is that many of the smaller municipalities in the province have not set wheeling rates, noted Sharief Harris, head of development at Cape Town-based IPP Red Rocket, during Winde’s 30th Energy Digicon.
Harris said this made it hard to send power to smaller customers within municipalities that don’t often have frameworks for wheeling or don’t have the mechanism to reach that end customer with its power.
Lester acknowledged that there is an issue with many of the smaller municipalities still having to establish wheeling tariffs.
“From a wheeling perspective, we have come quite far, but we now need municipalities to get the wheeling tariffs in place.”
Aside from wheeling tariffs being an issue, Harris also said the lack of capacity in power utility’s transmission grids in the Northern, Eastern and Western Capes is capping the amount of electricity that IPPs can distribute out of these provinces.
Red Rocket has various energy projects covering the full range of renewable energy sources, both in South Africa and abroad:
- Kruisvallei hydro project is located along the Ash River in the Free State. This hydroelectric plant will generate 24 GWh of electricity annually, catering to the power needs of around 1916 households;
- Roggeveld Wind is a wind energy facility near Laingsburg that will produce 613 GWh of power annually, powering nearly 50 000 homes;
- Kathu Solar is located in the Northern Cape and generates approximately 150 GWh of power per year;
- Tororo Solar North Limited is a special-purpose vehicle company that will operate a 10 MW photovoltaic plant in Uganda.
Harris said that Red Rocket 200 jobs created during the construction of the Roggeveld Wind farm and that 20 people were now permanently employed to run the facility.
During the construction of two other projects, the Brandvalley and Rietkloof Wind farms, 400 jobs were created, with 50 full-time employees managing the facilities.
Winde applauded Red Rocket’s efforts and said IPPs were key to reaching the province’s energy goals.
“We are on a mission to empower the private sector generally, and especially IPPs, such as Red Rocket, to help us reach our target of generating 5700 MW of power for the Western Cape over the next several years. Only through fostering partnerships with businesses will we be able to end power cuts.”
