The City of Cape Town has published a tender to build a grid-connected solar plant next year as it moves to shield its residents from the impact of Eskom’s routine load shedding.

The tender is for engineering, procurement and construction of a 7MW solar plant at Atlantis, north of the city. The plant will be connected directly into the city’s electrical network and is the first of several such facilities planned for the metro.

“The power plant will start generating electricity in 2024 and is expected to be in operation for 20 years, with a foreseen annual output of 14.7GWh,” the city said in a statement on Wednesday.

Cape Town currently purchases the vast bulk of its electricity from Eskom.

“High Eskom price escalations expected in future may not be financially sustainable for the city and its residents. It is expected that the Atlantis solar plant will enhance the city’s financial sustainability as the cost of generating the electricity will be lower than the bulk procurement from Eskom,” it said.

“Reducing the dependency on Eskom also means the city can develop and explore more climate-friendly power sources than Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.”

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The build is in addition to plans by Cape Town to procure electricity from independent power producers and encourage small-scale embedded generation. It has allocated R15-million in the current-year budget to buy energy from small-scale embedded generators.

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“I recently announced a policy shift allowing qualifying commercial and industrial electricity generators to sell energy to the city. The city also issued its first tender in the new independent power producer (IPP) programme, which entails buying 200MW from IPPs within the city’s electricity supply area,” Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said in the statement. – © 2022 NewsCentral Media