Drive for energy producers

Cape Town - Business is to play a bigger role in securing Cape Town’s electricity needs to counter national power supplier Eskom’s load-shedding impact on profits.

Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille said business would work with the local government to use renewable energy technology to generate electricity. She was scheduled to address business organisations at a meeting last night.

De Lille said Eskom’s power cuts, as part of its plan to spread a short-supply of electricity across the country, had led to “many periods of job-killing”.

“If we want to continue on the upward trajectory of economic growth and job creation in Cape Town, we need to act now to make our city and province energy secure,” she said.

“We cannot leave the future of energy security in the hands of Eskom. We no longer want to merely be distributors of electricity but want to become energy creators as well.”

De Lille said the city had previously simply bought electricity from Eskom and then distributed it.

She said the city now had various projects to create a new model to generate and distribute energy.

“This allows household and businesses to play a part in providing the solutions to our energy shortfalls while building local resilience for the future.”

The city had signed “small-scale embedded electricity generation contracts” with Black River Park Investments, as well as with 17 other major commercial customers and 43 industrial customers. They could feed electricity into the city’s grid.

De Lille said the city did not want residents to go off the grid, but to use PV (photovoltaic) panels to become energy producers. “We are also leading by example in our operations by retrofitting lights in buildings, as well as traffic and street lights,” she said.

Eskom this week said there had been no load-shedding for more than seven months and no planned power cuts were expected in autumn and winter.

Weekend Argus