THE City of Cape Town successfully wheeled solar power from one of Growthpoint’s shopping centres, The Constantia Village, to another one of the property company’s office buildings in the Foreshore on September 10.
Redefine Properties is also participating in the City’s electricity wheeling pilot project and is undertaking a 5.5 MW solar wheeling project on the roof of its wholly-owned Massmart distribution centre at Brackengate 2.
A wheeling agreement between the City and Growthpoint was signed at the end of August and Etana has acted as the energy trader.
The City of Cape Town’s six-month pilot project includes 15 wheeling participants representing 25 generators and 40 customers. The pilot will lay the groundwork for future wheeling in Cape Town and enable businesses to use energy from rooftop solar panels across multiple locations, encouraging them to optimise solar capacity instead of limiting it to individual building use.
“Overall, Cape Town is planning to add up to one gigawatt of independent power to end loadshedding in the city over time. The exact mix may vary, but we expect wheeling to contribute up to 350MW to the grid in time. Congratulations to the pioneering private sector players who successfully wheeled the very first electrons, and thanks to the City’s team who worked to get the enabling legislation, billing engine, and wheeling agreements in place. This is good news for the economy and the coming energy transition, which Cape Town is proud to be at the forefront of,” said Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.
SA CEO of Growthpoint Properties, Estienne de Klerk, says, “This project brings Growthpoint closer to our climate commitment of being carbon neutral by 2050 and is the starting point to providing clean green energy to our tenants in Cape Town to further their environmental commitments.”
Director of Etana Energy, Reyburn Hendricks, comments, “We are incredibly excited about this landmark initiative. Allowing the wheeling of electricity to municipal connected customers will accelerate Etana’s mission of bringing much-needed new renewable energy generation onto the grid in South Africa.”
Cape Town’s “end load-shedding” plans include wheeling electricity, partnering with independent power producers, paying households and businesses ‘Cash for Power’ generated by solar PV, the ‘Power Heroes’ incentive scheme for households to reduce energy demand, solar PV farms, and further optimising of the Steenbras Hydropower plant.
The City’s wheeling pilot aims to test and validate the contracting framework and billing engine for full-scale implementation. This initial transaction sets the foundation for Growthpoint to wheel clean energy to all its buildings in Cape Town in the future.
Redefine’s Brackengate 2 wheeling project design, with an estimated capital expenditure of R86 million, is being finalised for implementation during 2024 and is expected to take around 60 weeks to complete. It is anticipated that the project will wheel 8.8 million kWh (8.8GWh) to the national grid annually while saving 9.394 tons of carbon emissions.
