WIND POWER EDITOR’S
WIND POWER EDITOR’S CHOICE There is a huge opportunity - we have the resource and we need the jobs Following Windaba 2024, the annual event of the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), Opportunity spoke to Peter Venn, CEO of Seriti Green about his company’s multi-billion-rand new project in Mpumalanga and about the state of the renewable energy sector in South Africa. Did Seriti Green come into existence when Windlab Africa was acquired by Seriti Resources? The birthday of Seriti Green was 1 December 2022 and it was due to the acquisition of all of Windlab’s assets in Africa. We were 17 staff when we joined and we are now 54 people as Seriti Green. And the company that you and your colleagues were working for at the time, Windlab International, carries on? They are mainly based in Australia, and they continue to operate. How many projects does Seriti Green have in South Africa? That is slightly difficult to answer. There are four operating projects that we developed previously with various partners. We currently have three projects under construction with ACED/AIIM and we have our project that we own 100% of in Mpumalanga. Those four projects have passed financial close and we have a very strong pipeline of more than 3GW of projects across the development pipeline. One of these is in Kenya, one in Tanzania and then in Mpumalanga, the Free State, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape in South Africa. So you don’t always stay in a project? Prior to becoming Seriti Green, we were a junior developer. We took projects to financial close but we didn’t have the financial muscle to take them forward; these projects are approximately R4-billion to R5-billion each. As Seriti Green we will stay in. BIOGRAPHY Peter Venn is a leading advocate for Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET), bringing over 13 years of deep experience in the renewable energy sector. His leadership has been pivotal in advancing sustainable energy solutions, particularly through wind power. For 11 years, Peter served on the global executive committee at Windlab, where his strategic direction was instrumental in the development of wind energy projects across rural Africa. Beyond his executive roles, he has significantly shaped the broader energy landscape, serving on various boards and committees including the Energy Council of South Africa, the South African Wind Energy Association and the SA committee of the World Energy Council in South Africa, marking him as a key voice in our country's energy future. 30 | www.opportunityonline.co.za
Ground has been broken at Seriti Green’s Ummbila Emoyeni project. Are new pricing structures for kilowatt hours forcing South African developers to get foreign partners or stay away from bidding? Absolutely. The market is a race to the bottom due to the way the tenders are done. Eskom gets the lowest cost per kilowatt hour, but the South African risk-free rate is somewhere between 10.5% and 11% and if people are developing projects for Eskom their returns are less than that. It makes no sense for South African investors to invest at a 10% return into a wind-energy project and the only people willing to do that are basically European-backed government projects. Please tell me about the first utility-scale hybrid project at Meru County Energy Park in Kenya. With Windlab, we were the first hybrid project in Australia when we did the Kennedy Energy Park. That involves wind, solar and battery all behind the meter. From a utility perspective you see a profile that is all of those altogether, and we received permits in the same way in Meru County. There had been a moratorium on power-purchase agreements (PPAs) in Kenya for a couple of years but we are ready to construct. I fly tonight to Nairobi to meet with the relevant department. We are just awaiting off-take agreements before we can construct that project. It will be a highly beneficial project in the middle of the country. Do you see this as a model that will grow? I think it is going to be nigh on impossible to build any solar projects without battery. I am already talking to buyers who are aware of the peak-tariffing issue. If Eskom is not making revenue in the middle of the day because everybody is running solar, then you will see a disproportionate increase in peak tariffs. I think we are going to see that shift. Is your Mpumalanga project similarly hybrid in nature? We are permitted for the battery and solar components. We started building the wind element just to get the transformer in. The cost is over a billion rand so we needed to get that going. The transformer will be on site in November, then it is about moving on to hybridisation. When complete, the project will have 100MW of solar, 800MW hours of battery and 750MW of wind. But that only applies to the complete project. Do you have targets in terms of megawatts? We very much want to be through the 1 000MW (or one gigawatt) by 2030, operating. We have a stretch goal of 2GW to 3GW but where governmental processes currently take three to four years to get a project permitted, I don’t want to be over-optimistic. If we can reduce that period to, say 24 months, then the capital is available to get things going. However, as things stand, I think we are very comfortable with the 1GW by 2030 number. And you are currently at? This Mpumalanga project is only 150MW but our transformer is for 1 000MW so just utilising the capacity of this investment will take us through the thousand. What are the qualities of Mpumalanga Province that attracted you? The wind is basically of equivalent strength as elsewhere but slightly higher; our towers are 130m where people elsewhere in the country are maybe 110m. That requires a bit more capex in building that out. Obviously, it is the energy heartland of the country and many of our staff haven’t had to move home. Secunda is only 20km down the road and from a wheeling perspective and a technical-losses perspective, technically Sasol will use all our electricity. At the moment there’s significant available grid. As we speak today, there is 3GW available, and that’s with no de-commissioning of coal-fired plants. I am obviously ignoring Komati there, but by 2030 [when several plants will have been de-commissioned] we can probably see that figure going to 5GW of available capacity that Eskom doesn’t need to invest in. Will your power not be directed to Seriti’s mining assets? No, that’s why I said “technically”. Seriti will be buying all of the electricity for the first 155MW but our line physically terminates in Secunda. Technically the electrons will flow to Sasol, but contractually all of the first phase will go to Seriti. Is the height of the wind power the only difference with other sites in South Africa? Another thing that is different is that it is much more benign, so we don’t get the big strong winds. Where in the Cape provinces you might install a Class 1 turbine, which deals with higher wind www.opportunityonline.co.za | 31
