As load-shedding grips the country yet again, independent power producers (IPPs) say they are ready and able to step into the breach and provide surplus electricity quickly and cheaply.
Their comments at an information session on Wednesday are in response to the government’s call for the independent power industry to detail if it has the capability to urgently provide 3,000MW, or 7.5%, of SA’s generation capacity, to plug Eskom’s supply shortfall.
The industry has invested nearly R210bn to generate green power that it sells to the state-owned power utility.
The energy department’s Independent Power Producers (IPP) Office aims to tie up the request for information by the end of February, which might be too late for an economy struggling to grow amid rolling power cuts as Eskom struggles to keep the lights on.
Speaking from the crowd at the session on the Request for Information (RFI), hosted by the IPP office on Wednesday, CEO of the Kathu Solar Park, Cedric Faye, said his company’s 100MW Northern Cape project was already producing additional megawatts and could quickly and cheaply feed these into the national power system.
He asked if it was possible to amend the power purchase agreement, as they could produce more.
This would also avoid all the time taken by RFIs and request for proposal (RFP) discussions.
Faye’s sentiments were echoed by the wind industry, which is proposing that existing power supply restrictions be lifted on all operating wind farms in order to unlock 500MW of extra capacity that is immediately available.
If the restrictions were lifted, the government could buy surplus energy from these plants for as low as 40c/kWh, the SA Wind Energy Association said.
Eskom sells power at an average price of 90c/kWh, but says that this tariff is not cost reflective.
The IPP Office’s Pervelan Govender said the purpose of the RFI was to determine what solutions were available to the government and, as such, the increased output of existing power plants was an option that would be considered.
Other options, as mentioned by energy minister Gwede Mantashe, might be special purpose vessels known as powerships — ships on which a power plant is installed — though industry experts have warned this would probably be expensive.
Several attendees at the meeting also called for regulatory restrictions on self-generation or embedded generation to be lifted in order to ease demand on the power grid.
The IPP Office’s Maduna Ngobeni said it was important to note that the RFI was one of a number of interventions the government was looking at.
Others, such as unblocking restrictions on embedded generation, did not fall within the IPP Office’s ambit.
Clyde Mallinson, an energy consultant, suggested that instead of having bidders for the emergency power compete against one another on price, the IPP Office ought to use a feed-in tariff that would simply dictate what it would pay for power from different technologies.
"We haven’t got time to go through a long process of RFI, RFP, bidding and financial close. By that stage the country’s economy would have gone through a financial close," he said.
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