Cape Town - In Premier Alan Winde’s weekly Energy digicon yesterday, Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said that the City was in detailed talks to possibly take over some Eskom electricity-supplied areas.
Hill-Lewis was Winde’s featured guest this week to update the public on the City’s plans to protect residents from the first four stages of Eskom’s load shedding within three years.
He said major milestones had been reached, including a 500MW dispatchable energy tender expected to open on March 29.
With this progress, Hill-Lewis said the City was eager to take over Eskom’s supply areas and was engaged in detailed discussions with Eskom about this.
“I am under contractual obligation and have signed a non-disclosure agreement with Eskom not to discuss the details because it relates to negotiations with unions and so on … It is my sincere hope that the new Eskom management, when it is appointed, is as committed to those discussions as the outgoing management has been,” Hill-Lewis said.
The City has had “great co-operation to this point” on this process from Eskom management and HillLewis was hopeful this progress would continue.
“We pay for a much greater level of investment and maintenance of our electricity grid infrastructure. People who live in Eskom-supplied areas know that if they have an outage they could wait days for supply to be restored and the fault to be repaired, whereas in City supply areas the faults are far less frequent, our power stations are in much better condition, and
the electricity faults are responded to within hours,” Hill-Lewis said.
During the digicon, Winde said the Western Cape Government’s budget of over R1 billion for the province’s load shedding response will kick in on April 1, which was critical to make sure they get the overall energy strategy right within this year and mitigate as much of the load shedding pressure being felt as possible.
Alwie Lester, special energy adviser to the premier, reiterated that in the short term, the province looked to reduce reliance on Eskom from between 500MW and 750MW by 2025 and elaborated on their Energy Generation Programme, one of the objectives needed to realise this goal.
A key facet of the programme was to employ solar and battery initiatives at a variety of public spaces, including 100 lower quintile schools – R100 million was set aside for this.
“We would like to fit these schools with solar panels that run to battery and inverter systems,” Lester said.
Another facet of the programme was to identify four to five towns in the province and look at the potential of taking those towns off the grid, before winter, using containerised solar with battery units.
“We are about to go to market to see what is available for this type of product,” Lester said.