As SA’s electricity crisis deepens, the country’s biggest pharmaceutical manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, is pressing ahead with plans to eliminate its reliance on the national power grid.
Aspen, which makes a wide range of generic medicines and Covid-19 vaccines, joins a growing list of companies moving off the grid to save on the costs of running diesel-powered generators and reduce the risks of relying on state-owned power utility Eskom.
While companies have been grappling with intermittent load-shedding since 2008, the frequency and intensity of planned outages have intensified sharply in the past six months as Eskom is increasingly unable to provide reliable electricity supplies from its ageing, coal-powered power stations.
Eskom has imposed rolling blackouts daily this year, and increased the frequency with which it imposes stage 6 load-shedding in which it sheds 6,000MW from the national grid, leaving some users without electricity for up to 12 hours a day.
Private hospital groups have stepped up plans to reduce their reliance on Eskom and shift towards renewable energy, as have retailer Pick n Pay, cellphone operator Vodacom, and SA Breweries.
Aspen’s Gqeberha manufacturing plant, which already obtains 8% of its electricity requirements from on-site solar power, is now embarking on a project to purchase power from third party suppliers that generate electricity from waste plastic, said Aspen COO Lorraine Hill. The plastic is converted into a synthetic fuel in a process known as pyrolysis.
Backup generators
“We aim to be off the grid entirely in about 18 months,” she said on the sidelines of a private health conference organised by the International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank.
Aspen is fully buffered against power cuts with backup generators, but is moving off the grid to ensure it can maintain its operations regardless of blackouts and infrastructure failures, she said.
The company has a close working relationship with the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, and does not usually face power cuts unless Eskom implements level 5 or 6 load-shedding, said Hill.
“We generally negotiate the times we go down, and might do it all at once rather than several times a day,” she said. During higher load-shedding stages, users are typically without power sometimes for up to four hours at a time, multiple times a day. The municipality has a similar arrangement in place with other large companies, such as car manufacturers, she said.
Moving off the grid would save on diesel costs, remove the uncertainty of relying on Eskom, and shift Aspen to greener energy sources, she said.
Electricity generated from pyrolysis waste plastic is more environmentally friendly than that derived from coal-fired power plants, as it produces lower carbon emissions and reduces the volume of plastic destined for landfill sites, said Aspen executive for SA operations Christiaan Theron. It also has the potential to create waste-collection jobs in the local community, he said.
Aspen is already sourcing most of the water it needs for its Gqeberha facility independently of municipal supplies, using an on-site borehole and its own water treatment plant, said Hill.
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