The Port of Zeebrugge in
The Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium hosts a wind farm, something that would not be possible in South Africa. speed and is more expensive because it has to be more robust, ours is a Class 3 wind, which deals with gentler winds. Neither of these are good or bad. In the past you wouldn’t have come up to Mpumalanga because of the altitude but now we are running 91m blades and that more than makes up for the fact that the air is less dense. When you are running 30m blades you need more power from the density of the air but we don’t need that density to make it a competitive project. You and other panellists at Windaba mentioned that Mpumalanga’s land has high value. Please expand. Many farmers have two or three cash crops a year so the land value is expensive. We are having to compensate them during construction for crops that we are disturbing but we only use 1% of the land. Solar will struggle more in this context. There’s lots of water in the area and the crops are good; it is probably the breadbasket of South Africa. Is it possible to arrange wind turbines along the edges of agricultural fields? There are just way too many historical laws. We put a kilometre buffer around roads but there is no reason for that. How many turbines have fallen down in South Africa in 10 years compared to our traffic accidents? Of the land we secure less than 2% is able to be built on and then there are buffers of all sorts – water-course buffers, bat buffers, bird buffers, animal buffers, grave buffers, housing buffers, road buffers – so you have got to take all that legislation into account. I was in Belgium for an African Energy Forum and in the Zeebrugge harbour they have wind turbines. What a perfect place to put them! I haven’t thought of doing it, but if I did think of doing it there would be no ways legislation in South Africa would allow you to put a wind turbine in a harbour, it would be just too difficult. Have you had cooperation and assistance from local municipalities and provinces? In the phase before we started construction, there was a lot of education needed among government officials about the implications. We were the first project of this type in Mpumalanga. There was a lot of resistance because of the quantum of work. Let’s say you have a town planner in a small town, and up until that date your job was to approve a few houses a year and suddenly we came with a R5-billion project and you really had to step up your work. Having said that, once we broke ground, local municipalities have been fully behind the project. The mayors host a monthly meeting on coordination, we have direct access and the benefit to the local host communities has been exponential. We have over 400 local people employed on site at the moment. Why is curtailment necessary and are the necessary steps in place? [Curtailment means using some of the grid allocation from existing projects to enable new projects to operate.] The answer to the second question is no, but it is absolutely necessary. We have great infrastructure in this country, whether it is new or old doesn’t matter. Generally, a solar farm operates at 25% 32 | www.opportunityonline.co.za PHOTO: Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia Commons
WIND POWER and a wind farm at 40%. Therefore, with a solar plant on a line, the line is idle 75% of its time, with a wind farm 60% of the time. There is a huge opportunity to cross-pollinate these two technologies. Generally, wind isn’t as strong in the middle of the day, it is much better in the evening peaks. It is about optimising this scarce resource and we really need Eskom, NERSA, all the powers that be, to come together to allow for proper curtailment and to sort out the rules so that we can get more generation on the grid, utilising the existing transmission infrastructure. Who should be doing that, would that be NERSA? It would be NERSA and Eskom. It is high on many people’s agenda, and there is a particular workstream at the National Energy Crisis Committee that is working on this collaboration with government. It is getting a lot of attention but the reason you continue to see under-performance in the bid windows for wind energy is because there’s no curtailment and there is no legislation. At Windaba we heard about potential problems related to logistics at the Port of Ngqura because of the huge volumes of renewable energy kit expected and coordination is not being done. Is there the same problem in Richards Bay? I have a little bit of sympathy for Transnet because we have had a stop-start, stop-start approach to renewable energy. Number one, the port people need to see this as a business opportunity going forward. Now that Eskom is out of the PPAs, private-power operators and developers can prosecute as we need to prosecute on projects. It is a big challenge but this is a huge opportunity. It is also a multi-governmental challenge because the agency that oversees roads needs to be involved to move abnormal loads and so on. We are spending over R50-million on upgrading the Richards Bay Port to alleviate some of this, but these challenges are foreseeable as our Mpumalanga project comes on board. You really need a coordination body to say, “When are your turbines coming?” But we are all reluctant to be in a room alone together because of the anti-competitive stance. The port authority needs to take a handle on this, it needs to have a queuing system. You should be booking slots but none of this is occurring. Your R50-million investment at Richards Bay is with the Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA)? Yes. We are fixing the quayside and we are building up by-pass roads so the container traffic can continue while we are offloading. Is it true that different provinces have different permitting regimes? Absolutely, in Mpumalanga our rezoning certificate cost us five times or six times more than the Eastern Cape one did, so it is up to municipalities to decide on these fees. We are dealing with agencies that have never seen a wind turbine being built in their province so there needs to be a national study tour to visit operating wind farms. We would be more than happy to be involved but we can’t spearhead it. Again, it has to be something like NERSA or Eskom? Or the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and then there’s the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, who could be spearheading a national tour for government officials to see development under construction and completed wind projects and solar projects. That way they can get a better understanding. What potential is there in rehabilitated mines? It can happen that you secure big swathes of land with the vision of doing mining, but you may or may not mine on that land. More importantly, you could be wanting to do other activities 2km away from fully rehabilitated land but it still falls within the parameters of your mining licence and under the Mine Health and Safety Act. It is incredibly difficult to access this land from a permitting perspective from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy. Who has the ownership and where does the liability sit? There’s a national imperative for properly rehabilitated mining land to be easily passed across to renewable energy companies and for miners to be free of the liabilities, as long as the job has been done appropriately. Renewable energy companies should be able to build, construct and operate under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. To build a wind farm under the Mine Health and Safety Act doesn’t make sense, it is illogical. What are the advantages of the hub-and-spoke model? At the moment we are building transformers based on where the IPP is and where the IPP can afford to build. This is not necessarily where Eskom would choose to have them, but it comes back to the same issue as with the ports. It is not up to me and three other developers to get together and decide where to put a substation. At the moment there is no method of cost-sharing. If I want to build a 400MW plant I must spend a billion, if you want to build a 600MW plant you have got to spend a billion, so we each spend a billion on a transformer maybe 50km apart, that is madness. However, I understand Eskom’s problem, because there is a lot of what we call in the industry “bragawatts”, so not real megawatts and Eskom is confused as to what is real and what is not real. There are a couple of simple ways to measure if projects are real and fundamentally it is about whether the money is there. Should South Africa be more ambitious in its renewable energy targets? If the powers that be – government and government agencies – don’t come to the party we can’t be more ambitious. The grid applications for which I recently paid Eskom took 14 months. The previous application took two-and-a-half years, so there is no point in being aggressive if these timelines aren’t adhered to. I am not going to go down a deep hole but we should absolutely have more aggressive targets. There is a huge opportunity; we have the resource and we need the jobs but the red tape that stands in our way and because of the lack of coordination we are just going to shoot ourselves in the foot by setting targets that we will never meet. www.opportunityonline.co.za | 33
