Cape Town moving towards a cleaner, greener future

Alderman James Vos, Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth

Green Energy Africa Summit, 5 October 2022

Good morning everyone, and thank you for bringing this important gathering to our fair city.

The importance of this summit, taking place in this city and country, at this time in our world, cannot be understated.

South Africa is currently experiencing an unprecedented scale of power outages. On a global scale, the rapidly growing energy needs of our global community is putting demands on the sector that are driving oil and gas prices through the roof, making it more and more unaffordable for people.

Here in Cape Town, we stand apart because the City successfully deploys the use of its Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme to protect City customers from up to two stages of load-shedding where possible. Between February and July 2022, the City protected its customers from 722 hours of Eskom load-shedding.

A critical time to invest in green opportunities

And so, there has never been a more critical point to make real commitments towards the vast energy opportunities of renewables.

The clean energy opportunities of Africa are vast – and largely untapped. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Africa is home to 60% of the world’s best solar resources, yet it hosts only 1% of the global installed solar PV capacity.

There is a similar scale of potential with wind energy with research commissioned for the International Finance Corporation finding that Africa’s wind resources could supply its electricity demand 250 times over.

Cape Town moving towards a cleaner, greener future

In Cape Town, this City government is pushing ahead with projects that seize on such energy-supply opportunities or otherwise encourage a creative, out-of-the-box approach.

This includes:

• A tender for the engineering, procurement and construction of a 7 megawatt solar power plant in Atlantis. The plant is scheduled to start generating electricity in 2024 and be in operation for 20 years, with a foreseen annual output of 14,7GWh and is expected to result in a R47,2 million gross domestic product increase. More such plants are planned across the metro.
• The City has also issued its first tender in the new Independent Power Producer (IPP) programme which entails buying 200MW from IPPs within the City’s electricity supply area.
• And it has also issued a tender for third-party aggregators who will reward so-called ‘Power Heroes’ for reducing their electricity usage. This will help to keep more supply on the grid, giving further load shedding protection to City-supplied customers.

On the other side of this, we understand that there must be a consistent pipeline of skilled workers and businesses able to meet the demands of services and products within this sector.

And so we work closely with partners embedded in the industry. Partners such as GreenCape help us to understand the investment potential of the sector while fuelling skills development of small businesses and communities such as Atlantis.

I want to highlight this area that boasts the Atlantis Special Economic Zone which is dedicated to the manufacturing and provision of greentech services.

Under this green banner, the City transferred land to the Atlantis Specialised Economic Zone Company in a deal that allows the organisation to legally contract on site with prospective bidders. Thanks to such initiatives, Atlantis is now a prime development area with 94 hectares of zoned development-ready land available for leasing to investors.

And to make sure that we can seize opportunities in Cape Town, my Directorate’s Investment Facilitation Branch is tasked with helping firms large and small to land and expand in Cape Town. This branch has assisted more than 20 companies, unlocking investments worth billions of rands and thousands of job opportunities.

Conclusion

In closing, ladies and gentlemen, investing in green energy in Africa is good – and necessary – for our economies and people.

This drive towards greater production of clean power must be people-centred and just. In other words, those who currently work in this sector must be equipped with the necessary renewable energy-sourcing skills.

The City of Cape Town and our partners stand ready to help you get that foot in the door so that we can move towards a cleaner future, together. Thank you.