On the heels of last week’s announcement that SA had signed off on the first emergency power projects, the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) said on Monday it has approved registration certificates for 16 generation facilities with capacity to produce a combined 210MW of renewable energy from wind and solar.
Power purchase agreements were signed last week between the government, Eskom and a private renewable energy company for three of the 11 successful bids for SA’s emergency power procurement programme, which was launched in 2020 to supplement the country’s immediate energy shortfall with about 2,000MW of power supply.
The three projects, all from the same bidder under the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP), will add 150MW of dispatchable (baseload) solar energy to the Eskom grid when it comes online within the next 14 to 20 months.
Eleven of the 16 generation facilities that were approved by Nersa this week will be generating electricity for their own use (from about 10MW generation capacity), and five generation facilities will be generating for commercial purposes (from about 200MW capacity).
The five commercial facilities will add additional capacity of 72MW from wind-generated power and about 130MW from solar panels via an Eskom grid-connection.
According to Nersa, all 16 applications were received in April and processed within 19 working days.
“Since the increase of the registration threshold from 1MW to 100MW (as announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in June last year), Nersa has approved 216 registration applications,” the regulator said in statement.
In the first quarter of the 2022 calendar year, 54 generation facilities with a total capacity of 29MW were approved, representing a total investment cost of about R452m.
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