Mea culpa! I did not explain in full. The report says that they have been supplying the grid since mid-December, and that they have a twenty year contract.
These PPA plants have been successful over the years I understand.
Now with battery addition they can manage some of the erratic power fluctuations and continue feeding power after dark.
I recall one of the scares of these plants when they started building them was what happened when a cloud passed over the facility…
The answer was (before the storage option they have now) was not to build them all next to each other. This has been the fix for RE generally and that is to make them big enough to move power from where it’s available to where it is required.
Some good news: The National Transmission Company is now standalone and boasts a good board
With all the independent power being produced, how to store and transmit it, mainly from the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape, is a big question.
The board of the National Transmission Company of South Africa will oversee the country’s grid expansion and become an essential institution. There are 12 fabulous South Africans on the board, all potentially excellent stewards of a vital transmission line, and key to our future. The chairperson is Priscillah Mabelane, Sasol’s VP for energy business. She is doing fascinating work on the transition there. The lead independent director is Dr Brian Armstrong, a lecturer on strategy, digitalisation, R&D, systems engineering and more at Wits Business School. Daily Maverick columnist and genuinely progressive energy thinker, Professor Mark Swilling, is also on the board.
Ferial Haffajee
Associate Editor
If I want more power I put up more panels where I need them.
That is because I pay for my cabling between the panels and the load and that cabling is expensive.
It is cost-effective to use an additional panel rather than try to squeeze another watt out of existing panels using another device that costs more than a panel.
So the question is, is it cheaper to put fewer panels in the Northern Cape with the extra cost of transmission lines, or is it cheaper to use more panels close to the load centres?
Or better yet, put panels where there is surplus transmission capacity, like at decommissioned thermal power stations.
It looks to me like I could buy a shedload of extra panels for the price of those transmission lines.
I’d wager those transmission lines will cost more than the solar installations. The servitudes of these lines will probably also occupy more physical area than the solar farm itself.
So exactly how much sunnier are these far-off regions, not all that much it seems. The Northern Cape is only 15% better than the Western Cape, and in fact roughly that over any other region.
So how much of this is about the “entrepreneur” picking up cheap land in the middle of nowhere and then palming off the cost of the cabling on the taxpayer?
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I think I see a trend. Somehow, there is a group of people just quietly forging ahead, making the world a better place.
There was a joke in Namibia back in the day, about how laid back the people of that country is. They are so laid back, they appointed a couple of (insert name of tribe) guys to run the government, so that that is out of the way and the rest of them can get on with the real work.
It seems like SA is doing much the same. Let Uncle Mantashe do his thing… the rest of us will do the real work.
I’m very positive about this, because this opens doors that will see our carbon footprint drop. The more incompetent the government, the faster it drops. All this load shedding nonsense may yet become an asset.
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That’s significantly more neutral than the previous time they reported that Eskom will tax your solar. Credit where it is due…
I read about a harebrained prospect of Morocco having PV farms and the the power was to be transmitted via undersea cable for use in the UK.
I haven’t heard much more about this one…
It would make way more sense to wheel it through Spain and France. Or even Portugal.
The distance to Spain across the Mediterranean is something like 25km if memory serves.
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Even more sense if it just means supplying Gibraltar.
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Jinne, these LS App beeps all the time … each time one wonders … “WHAT NOW???”
Then it is no LS, then it is L1, no, it is L2, no, it is L0, no, it is now L2 … nope, no LS … geez man, paraat se moere.
Tune it down man …,
There, I feel (not) better now!
These days there is only one reason left to check the schedule. So you know what to cook tonight. If it goes in the oven, and there is a 6PM slot scheduled somewhere for stages 1 to 3, then cook something else.
But then also, I have this little “Bosch” oven that came with the house, which for a long time we ignored, and due to the way things were wired, it ended up on the backup side. After upgrading the inverter from a 3kVA to a 5kVA… man, that little oven is not bad at all! It cooks a Pizza or a Lasagna quite well, from battery power.
So… really the only irritation now is that I need to remember to occasionally reset the pool timer.
A good read for a change!
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Last year, just me and the wife in the main house, I put the “kitchen” onto critical loads. Took the old oven circuit, split it off, and added 4 more plugs.
The wife knows to look for the “Christmas Tree” (her words) on the inverter, for LS or not.
Now induction plate, air fryer, kettle, MW, on these 4 dedicated plugs, can now be used.
Sat one night and thought… I’ve spent all this money yet I must follow my own rules … nee wat. Bogger dit.
One oepsie in all the DB’s re-work (because of the fault I had) … old tech aircon now also accidentally on Critical Loads … yeah, that is my problem.
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So we can give up feeding power back to the grid for $$
Why must we do that?
If Eskom formulated an attractive option for us we would feed back and help them even more…Maybe even use our battery banks to help in the evenings on a TOU tariff.
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Well that’s a different story. It would require TOD billing I presume which at this level doesn’t exist…
The FIRST thing that popped to mind … O shiite.
Why? Winter is coming.