Companies compelled to consider alternative power sources to ensure business continuity.

Green buildings are increasingly in demand in the face of concerns around Eskom’s ability to sustainably supply power.

At the recent African Utility Week conference, energy minister Jeff Radebe told delegates that “Eskom alone cannot meet our power capacity requirements, because we estimate that the capacity extension under the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) will cost in excess of R1 trillion in the period up to 2030, including the new power plants plus the requisite transmission and distribution infrastructure”.

Property company Redefine recently noted that installing renewable energy interventions is an area with scope for growth, notably to alleviate some of the pressure caused by Eskom’s blackouts and tariff increases.

For the six months to February 2019, Redefine saw total solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity increase to 23.5 megawatt-peak (MWp; power output at rated laboratory conditions) across its property portfolios. The property company says green buildings remain a key development priority in line with creating a sustainable business.

Green buildings offers a multitude of benefits

“Our green buildings benefit our business, our tenants and our environment by utilising the latest technology across designs, drawing less power from the grid, reducing our carbon footprint, and optimising operational costs,” says CEO Andrew König.

Pieter Strydom, commercial asset manager at Redefine Properties, says that while Sandton has an oversupply of office space, well located prime grade green buildings remain in demand, keeping vacancy in that market segment low.

“While traffic remains the key detractor in the Sandton node, new builds offer amenities, accessibility to transport and efficient green-building designs,” he notes.

Global move towards renewable solutions

Oil giant Total launched a programme two years ago to equip about 5 000 of its service stations globally with solar power by 2021.

Around 53 Total service stations in South Africa currently run on solar energy.

Pierre-Yves Sachet, chief executive of Total South Africa, says as the global population and its energy requirements continue to grow, the need for responsible energy consumption becomes more dire. The fourth-largest gas and oil company in the world, Total operates three solar farms in the Karoo and has plans to expand its solar production footprint in South Africa.

Microgrid solution

Marco Rahner, Siemens country manager for Kenya and the East Africa hub, says the company launched a microgrid solution last year that won an award for the Digital Solution of the Year. “Distributed energy systems (DES) technologies offer building owners and energy consumers opportunities to reduce cost, improve reliability and secure additional revenue,” he says. “Siemens is able to offer an end-to-end solution looking at making buildings greener, while also assessing the clients’ power requirements and installing a microgrid solution.”

Rahner explains that the Siemens solution includes a microgrid controller that stabilises the grid in the event of an outage and allows for cost-optimised energy consumption.
Siemens recently signed up to develop an expandable microgrid solution for an industrial and business park in Ghana called WestPark. As part of the agreement, Siemens will develop a 250 kilowatt (kW) microgrid that controls the energy generation and throughput for the initial phase of buildings to be constructed at WestPark.

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The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) has finally released a consultation paper for an updated Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice for certain categories of small-scale embedded generators (SSEGs), which was submitted to the regulator for its concurrence by Energy Minister Jeff Radebe late last year.

Stakeholders and members of the public have been invited to comment on the draft amendment to the Electricity Regulation Act, with a deadline of May 24 set for submissions.

The notice seeks to replace the November 2017 Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice, which is widely accepted to be “flawed” and which has also caused significant market uncertainty.

The new notice exempts various categories of SSEG plant under 1 MW from the requirement to apply for and hold a licence under the Act, including a facility that supplies electricity to a customer who is an end-use customer.
One operated to supply an end-use customer, or related customers by wheeling.
And the operation of a generation facility for demonstration purposes only, whether or not the facility is connected to a transmission or distribution network.

The notice also covers existing generation facilities, including those that filed for registration with the regulator within six months of commencement of the registration process by the regulator.

It also covers the trading of electricity by a reseller.

Separately, Nersa’s electricity subcommittee approved, on May 13, registration applications for 16 SSEGs and one cogenerator in line with the 2017 Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice, which remains in force until the new notice is promulgated. 

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The Radisson Blu Hotel in Granger Bay, Cape Town, has recently disconnected from the drinking water network. It will now source its supplies from its own desalination plant.Radisson Blu, a leading American luxury hotel brand, has an establishment in Granger Bay, a district of Cape Town in South Africa. The water used in this hotel has so far been provided by the municipality. In recent days, however, Radisson Blu has disconnected itself from the city’s drinking water network, since it now has its own seawater desalination system.

“We dug a well under the hotel to access the water source. This allows us to pump enough water for our reverse osmosis plant to keep our hotel’s fresh water tank full at all times,” says Gary Bowers, the engineer who designed the desalination unit. It is capable of supplying 7 m3 of fresh water per hour from a 100 m deep borehole.

In reality, the Radisson Blu Hotel in Granger Bay has been forced to have its own drinking water source, because despite some stabilisation in the drinking water supply in Cape Town, restrictions on the use of the precious liquid remain in place. These decisions were made during the 2018 dry season when water stopped flowing through the taps for several weeks.

The use of a desalination plant means that we can no longer operate from municipal water supplies. In this way, we are able to play our role in saving water during this period of scarcity. Our customers can be assured that they do not put pressure on the local water supply when they stay with us,” says Clinton Thom, General Manager of Radisson Blu in Granger Bay.

The hotel is not the only structure to have disconnected from the drinking water distribution network in Cape Town. In August 2018, Lucky Star, a producer of canned fish, commissioned two seawater desalination plants in Laaiplek and Amawandle Pelagic on the west coast of South Africa. The treated water is intended for fish canning plants. Both plants were built by the South African company ImproChem in partnership with Suez Water Technologies & Solutions, a subsidiary of the French group Suez. They both provide 624 m3 of fresh water per day.

Source   Jean Marie Takouleu

Load-shedding is a major problem for South African businesses, with telecommunications companies, manufacturing industries, and corporate enterprise suffering whenever Eskom decides to turn off the power.

Businesses with high power requirements such as data centres are especially vulnerable, and the diesel generators used to keep these powered under load-shedding have extremely high operating costs.

This makes them prohibitively expensive to run for an extended period of time, which means that regular load-shedding could financially cripple many businesses.

There may be a solution to this sustainable backup power problem, however, thanks to the efforts of energy companies like GenCell.

GenCell develops hydrogen power cells as a cost-effective replacement for diesel backup and off-grid power delivery, and this technology could have a big impact in South Africa.

MyBroadband spoke to GenCell CEO Rami Reshef about the company’s fuel cell technology and how it could be implemented locally.

Developing hydrogen fuel cells
“We did not invent the hydrogen fuel cell. They were first invented in 1839 by William Grove, and their first commercial use was in the US and Russian space programmes to provide power on board spacecraft,” Reshef said.

GenCell’s fuel cells require hydrogen and oxygen to create chemical reactions and generate energy, with the byproduct of this reaction being water.

“When we founded in 2011, we identified two main barriers – the capital expenditure for the cost of a platinum catalyst and the operating expenditure for the high cost of the hydrogen,” Reshef said.

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“If we could overcome these two barriers, we had a fair chance to present a fuel cell technology which could become mainstream.”

The company developed a non-platinum catalyst in 2011, dramatically reducing the capital expenditure required, and it had also implemented CO2 scrubbers to use oxygen from the surrounding air.

Crucially, GenCell also developed a way to use ammonia for the hydrogen component of its reaction, dramatically reducing the cost to operate these fuel cells.

“The cost of ammonia is half or even one third as the equivalent weight of diesel,” Reshef said.
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Electrical house (eHouse) solutions and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure provider TGOOD Africa is expanding its business into Africa and aims to establish offices in Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia in the next nine to twelve months.

The company’s head office for its sub-Saharan Africa operations is in Johannesburg and the company also has offices in Nairobi, in Kenya, Abuja, in Nigeria, and Accra, in Ghana.

TGOOD Africa has undertaken projects in all the mentioned countries, as well as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia. The company also has agreements with distributors in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal.

The company is focused on delivering modular, prefabricated power distribution solutions across the utilities, infrastructure, mining and renewable-energy markets in Africa.

“In South Africa, there is a trend where companies will take second-hand shipping containers and convert them into substations; we don’t do that – it is dangerous and a low cost, low quality solution. Our solution is a custom-designed and custom-built eHouse,” TGOOD Africa CEO Kobus Coetzer tells Engineering News.

The enclosures of TGOOD’s eHouses are made of what the com- pany calls a “ribcage” of steel columns and the gaps in-between are closed with metal sheets and insulation material. Once everything is fitted, the enclosure has an IP54 rating.

He adds that the eHouses are built according to clients’ specifications, and if a client does not have specifications, TGOOD can assist them with developing such specifications.

The eHouses are manufactured in Qingdao, in China, but TGOOD Africa wants to establish a manufacturing plant in South Africa in the future.

TGOOD will also be launching new battery technology that can be used for energy storage, in the next nine to twelve months.

“This is going to revolutionise energy storage,” Coetzer highlights.

He contextualises this statement by outlining the current generation of batteries that is being used for energy storage’s several shortcomings. These include that the batteries have a limited lifecycle, cannot be fast charged more than a few times and have limited discharging cycles they can handle before becoming obsolete.

The battery technology that TGOOD intends to launch can be fast charged and can be discharged limitlessly. He notes that he sees a big market for this technology in South Africa.

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Email CV to wayne@jcsolar.co.za

Financial services group Nedbank reported an “overwhelmingly positive” market response on Tuesday to its pioneering listing of a renewable-energy bond on the Green Bond Segment of the JSE.

Nedbank became the first South African bank to list such an instrument on the bourse’s platform, which was itself launched in October 2017.

The proceeds will be used to provide financial support to solar and wind projects.

Nedbank CIB debt capital market origination head Bruce Stewart reported that the bond auction, which opened on April 24, “was significantly oversubscribed, demonstrating strong investor appetite for good-quality environmental, social and governance-focused assets".

​He added in a statement that the final pricing also exceeded initial expectations.

The bank received bids worth R5.5-billion,more than three times above the amount of R1.7-billion in bonds placed to fund renewables projects.

A diverse spread of investors subscribed for the bonds, including domestic asset managers and impact funds set up by foreign investors. At least 18 investors participated in the book, including the African Local Currency Bond Fund and the WWF fund.

The bond listing sought to build on the bank’s growing experience in the South African renewables sector, developed primarily through the funding of projects under government’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP).

Since 2011, 112 renewables projects with a combined investment value of R209.4-billion and a combined capacity of 6 422 MW have been procured through several REIPPPP bid windows.

To date, Nedbank has funded 42 of these transactions, worth a combined R40-billion.

The bond, Stewart said, allowed the bank to further extend support for the provision of clean energy in South Africa.

It also contributed towards the achievement of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, to which the bank had recently aligned its commercial activities.

Nedbank also recently confirmed that it would no longer participate in the funding of the Thabametsi and Khanyisa coal projects, named in 2016 as preferred bidders under South Africa’s coal procurement programme. The projects have yet to reach financial close.

The Nedbank Renewable Energy Bond was developed in line with International Capital Market Association Green Bond Principles and the Climate Bonds Standard. 

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T​he time is ripe for South African businesses to make applications for finance to develop renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects.

This is the view of the South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI) in the wake of load-shedding and energy price hikes.

SANEDI was established in 2011 under the National Energy Act, 2008. The Act provides for SANEDI to direct, monitor and conduct energy research and development, promote energy research and technology innovation, as well as undertake measures to promote energy-efficiency throughout the economy.

Financially-constrained Eskom, which supplies about 90% of SA's power, last month implemented stage four rotational load-shedding.

As the challenges at Eskom persist, SA has been making steady progress in incorporating renewables into the country's energy mix.

The South African government envisages that in 2030, the energy mix will consist of 34 000MW of coal, representing 46% of installed capacity; 11 930MW of gas, or 16% of installed capacity; 11 442MW of wind, or 15% of installed capacity; 7 958MW of photovoltaic (PV, or solar); and 4 696MW of hydropower, or 6% of installed capacity.

This was stipulated in the country's Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2018, a 20-year energy roadmap to meet SA's future power needs.

Electricity prices increased in SA from1 April. Last month, energy regulator Nersa said it had granted power utility Eskom the following tariff increases over the next three years: 9.41% or allowed revenue of R206.34 billion for 2019/2020; 8.10% or allowed revenue of R221.8 billion for 2020/2021, and 5.83% or allowed revenue of R233.1 billion for 2021/2022.

​SANEDI, which hosts SUNREF, an international lending programme that promotes green finance and energy innovation, has called on businesses to consider accessing SUNREF's green loans to develop renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects, in support of the country's efforts towards green transition.

SUNREF, developed by French Development Agency, is a programme relying on two pillars: a credit line to partner bank IDC, and a technical assistance facility hosted by SANEDI and funded by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs in Switzerland.

The programme helps green projects become bankable and access financing from IDC. It is linked to a credit line with the IDC for around $60 million to fund projects that fit its mandate to promote energy-efficiency and renewable energy in SA.

Rob Short from SUNREF explains who can apply for the green loans: "It can be any business, in any sector, that wants to look at energy-efficiency or renewable projects in terms of its own internal processes or within its supply chain. As well as companies that provide manufacturing services or goods for the renewable energy and energy-efficiency sectors."

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A growing number of banks are offering incentives for businesses and small companies to install  Solar Photovoltaic (solar PV)  panels, Jack Radmore, GreenCape’s energy programme manager, said. 

He said a typical solar panel installation, to power a small home between 4-7kWp, can cost anything between R60,000 and R105,000, excluding battery costs. 

This translates into roughly R1.30 per kWh for the next 15 years, he said. 

Commercial tariffs sit between 85c and R1.70 per kWh and residential tariffs can go as high as R2.20 per kWh. 

Read GreenCape's full financial brief here
Radmore said for a medium-sized commercial system, roughly the size of 250kWp, the price increase to roughly R3.2 million, excluding battery costs.

This translates into roughly R0.90 per kWh for the next 15 years.

“It is very important to highlight that these upfront costs are no longer a barrier in the South African decentralised energy market,” Radmore told Business Insider South Africa.

“A number of innovative financial mechanisms exist that require no upfront capital from the customer.”

For example, he said, a power purchase agreement allows consumers to buy electricity per unit as they do from Eskom at a set price for between 12 and 15 years. 

Also read: With the new power price, solar geysers are almost – but not quite – starting to make financial sense
Radmore gave Business Insider South Africa a break down of what each bank is offering for solar panel installations. 

It is important to note that solar panels are VAT deductible, and qualifies for a 12b tax benefit which can result in additional savings of 28% on cost. 

To ensure reliable power transmission, solar industry supplier Valsa is partnering with solar energy equipment suppliers A+Sun, SAT Control, Jinko Solar, Seraphim, Viasolis and electronics company Schweizer, as well as funding institutions, to provide funding for solar photovoltaic (PV) projects.

“The power sector is under pressure, considering its inability to supply sufficient power for end-users. The inadequate infrastructure, which does not sufficiently provide for businesses or the general public, is a contributing factor to this pressure,” says Valsa MD Svilen Voychev.

He avers that the ultimate solution is PV solar energy with battery storage directly linked to the grid, as a mini-grid or off-grid system where the infrastructure or network connections are poor or unstable. PV solar offers an alternative to having to build an expensive network infrastructure or decentralising the network, and will reach more people and businesses faster.

Voychev explains that PV solar, as an alternative power source, is more viable, particularly as it uses a cleaner alternative resource, solar energy, for power generation, compared with coal that contributes to environmental pollution and climate change.

Noting the technological advancements that have taken place in PV solar, he mentions that Valsa is in discussions with sister company Solar MD and has developed a new line of storage solutions with improved performance capability.

Moreover, the latest technological developments allow panels to follow the rotation of the sun, increasing the performance of the PV solar plant. These high-performance PV solar panels now ensure that the PV solar system is more sophisticated and makes power generation more effective.
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