South Africa’s Cape Town plans $213m grid upgrades

Ahead of the 2024 South African general election in May, the City of Cape Town has announced plans to invest more than R4 billion ($212.9 million) in electricity grid upgrades and maintenance over three years as part of its proposed Building for Jobs Budget for 2024/25.

According to a government-issued release, the upgrade plan aims to bolster power infrastructure as the city moves towards more decentralised sources of energy in efforts to combat load shedding.

Said the City’s mayoral committee member for energy, councillor Beverley van Reenen: “Any city hoping to end load-shedding simply must invest heavily in upgrading its electricity grid infrastructure.

“In the coming years, we will go from an Eskom monopoly to literally thousands of different power sellers, big and small, including people selling their excess solar to the City, commercial entities selling and wheeling electricity to each other, as well as big independent power producers feeding electricity into the grid at various points.”

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South Africa’s load shedding involves an ongoing period of widespread national blackouts to avoid excessive load on generating power plants.

As of end September 2023, over 5,700 hours of loadshedding had occurred in the country.

In Cape Town specifically, various efforts are underway via Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’ Energy Priority Programme to mitigate load shedding’s impact on the city, including:

• R220 million ($11.7 million) on embedded independent power purchase

• R288 million ($15.3 million) on the Power Heroes programme which looks at voluntary power reduction in return for an incentive

• An estimated R1 billion ($53.2 million) investment in the Steenbras hydro pump station over the next nine years

• R640 million ($34 million) on solar PV; R53 million ($2.8 million) Cash for Power programme, which involves selling excess power back to the City

• R50 million ($2.7 million) in battery storage

• R32 million ($1.7 million) on waste-to-energy

According to the city in its proposed budget plan, for the period 12 months to August 2023, nationally a total of 1-250,000MWh was not provided to Cape Town customers due to national load-shedding, although the City of Cape Town managed to mitigate over 216,000MWh of these cuts, which amounts to an average of 15%.

Amounting to 15%, the city attributes this primarily to reserved capacity from the Steenbras facility.

“With these investments, we are ensuring that Cape Town’s grid infrastructure can cope with a dynamic new energy future, which will drive economic growth and job creation in our city, “ added van Reenen.