Diversified miner Anglo American will establish a renewable energy business in SA in partnership with EDF Renewables, a British energy company that is wholly owned by the French state-owned EDF.
Through this partnership, the London and JSE-listed miner wants to install up to 5GW of renewables to not only meet its own operational power requirements in SA, but also support “the wider decarbonisation of energy in the country” and “catalyse economic activity in SA’s renewable energy sector”.
The new company, Envusa Energy, which will be jointly owned by Anglo American and EDF Renewables, will supply a blend of renewable energy, generated on Anglo American’s sites in the Southern Africa region, and renewable energy transmitted via the national grid.
The first tranche of 600MW of wind and solar projects to be developed by Envusa Energy is set to start construction in 2023 to deliver energy by 2025. The aim is to increase generation capacity to 3GW-5GW by 2030.
Pierre Herben, group head of carbon neutrality at Anglo American, told Business Day that about 1GW of renewable energy is needed to power its network of own and affiliated mines in SA. But this would only suffice for existing operations, with the group wanting access to more renewable energy to expand into emerging fields such as the green hydrogen economy.
Envusa Energy might also consider selling excess capacity generated by its renewables resources to other companies, he said.
Instead of establishing renewable energy capacity at each of its sites, to supply energy only to that site, they decided to partner with EDF to develop new renewables assets in locations where wind and solar farms would have the maximum exposure to sun and wind — thus maximising effective supply from these installations.
“This way we can tap into the best wind and solar resources,” said Herben.
In future they will also look at investing in energy storage so that electricity supply can be stretched over a full 24 hours, he said.
Tristan de Drouas, CEO for EDF renewables in SA, said the 600MW projects to commence in 2023 will be added to the almost 1GW of renewable energy generation capacity that the business will be building or operating in SA by 2023.
EDF Renewables was one of the winning bidders in window five of the SA government’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP), and it was the first of the winning bidders to sign power purchase agreements for its 420MW of wind projects with Eskom and the department of mineral resources & energy.
De Drouas said that it is looking forward to “bringing our global expertise in renewable energy infrastructure development, design and delivery to Envusa Energy”.
Renewable energy generated by the new company will also serve as a clean energy source to produce green hydrogen for Anglo’s planned fleet of hydrogen-powered mine haul trucks to reduce on-site diesel emissions at its mining sites.
“This is a significant milestone in Anglo American’s global decarbonisation journey and another step forward for SA’s clean energy future. We are making great strides towards our 2040 target of carbon neutral operations,” said Nolitha Fakude, chair of Anglo’s management board in SA.
According to the PwC SA Mine 2022 report that was released on Tuesday there is a significant opportunity for the mining sector to contribute to stable electricity supply at a national level. The Minerals Council SA has indicated that the sector already has plans to roll out about 5GW of renewable energy generation capacity by 2025. The PwC report says that given capacity factors for wind and solar, installed capacity of 5GW would translate to an effective supply of only 1.7GW of dispatchable power.
This will fall far short of expected peak supply gap of 7GW by 2025. To fill this gap, the report states, about 21GW of installed renewable capacity is required by 2025.
Updated: October 4 2022
This article has been updated with additional information
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