Jan Vermeulen 25 September 2022
It said the pilot’s success would provide Vodacom with renewable power and a blueprint for other South African corporates to replicate.
This would let more companies add capacity to the grid and help solve South Africa’s energy crisis, stated Vodacom.
Vodacom said its operating situation is unique due to the complexities of having over 15,000 distributed low-voltage sites across the country with linkage to 168 municipalities.
Until now, this complexity has prevented Vodacom from accessing power purchase agreements and “wheeling” — or transferring energy over Eskom’s grid.
While Vodacom would get its electricity from non-Eskom sources if the pilot is successful, the state-owned power utility would still provide transmission infrastructure and services.
“They want to start their own green power generation for their towers, but how do they get the electricity to the towers? That is where we will come in,” Eskom CEO André De Ruyter said in a wide-ranging Sunday Times interview.
De Ruyter explained that although Eskom is executing a plan to rent out land on which private power producers can build renewable energy generation, this takes time that South Africa simply does not have.
He said that Vodacom’s initiative is part of the government’s and Eskom’s shorter-term plans to unlock essential additional electricity generating capacity from South Africa’s private sector.
Eskom calls its appeal to the private sector “100 megawatts from 100 companies”.
If a hundred of South Africa’s large corporations could each put 100MW onto the grid, that would be 10,000MW — equivalent to 10 stages of load-shedding.
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