Construction World February 2015

COMMENT

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South Africa is currently in the grip of an energy crisis. Households and businesses are increasingly generating power on their rooftops with solar photovoltaic systems at a cost per kilowatt that now rivals the power that will eventually be generated by Kusile and Medupi power stations.

The 1.2 MW Black River Park Solar Project has broken new ground in becom- ing the largest integrated PV plant in Africa and the first to legally transmit electricity back into the City of Cape Town’s electrical distribution network.

EDITOR Wilhelm du Plessis constr@crown.co.za ADVERTISING MANAGER Erna Oosthuisen ernao@crown.co.za LAYOUT & DESIGN Lesley Testa CIRCULATION Karen Smith According the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) this cost is 81 cents per kilowatt hour while the costs of generating a similar kilowatt hour by Medupi and Kusile will be 80 cents. This has led to an increase of photovoltaic installations – the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) maintains that the combined capacity of these installations is 10 megawatts at present. If one considers that Germany – that has only half the amount of sunshine South Africa has annually – is aiming to generate 52 gigawatts of solar power by 2017, one realises the significance of such power generation. Germany has already achieved significant solar energy generation: on a specific day in June 2014 solar energy was responsible for half of the country’s power needs. In South Africa, Cape Town is one city that allows customers to produce solar energy while excess power that may be produced is sold back into the national energy grid. Eskom, however, has restrictions as to the size of photovoltaic installations and the amount

of energy that is sold back to the grid. This is because the selling of excess power back to the grid has implications for municipalities: these derive a part of their revenue from elec- tricity sales. Nersa believes that those who generate electricity with photovoltaic panels should pay more for electricity as they will boost demand from the grid when the sun goes down. Those that are for photovoltaic power maintain that it can alleviate strain and should not be a disincentive. It will, according to the Southern African Photovoltaic Industry Association, also create a new industry. From an outsider’s point of view it seems to be a case of Eskom asking clients to reduce consumption, but then penalising those that find alternative ways to reduce consumption. Nersa does justify its stance: it says that rooftop installations without storage make no contribution to reducing peak demand because of load shifting: the demand for electricity will pick up at a steeper rate than before as solar users switch back to the grid.

A second reason, they maintain, is that lower consumption during the day means munici- palities will lose revenue and will be unable to cover fixed costs. For this reason a time-of-use tariff is suggested as this will encourage users to include storage in their installation rather than export power back to the grid. The mass adoption of photovoltaic panels will lead to a drop in revenue for municipalities. However, the CSIR does suggest a way to stop this loss in revenue. Whatever the case: there does seem to be a lot of red-tape and contextual issues that stand in the way of improved energy use. One can only hope that such issues will be sorted out soon and that South Africans can harvest alternative energies without being penalised ... or negatively affecting other bodies.

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Wilhelm du Plessis Twitter: @ConstWorldSA

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CONSTRUCTION WORLD FEBRUARY 2015