Cape Town - At Western Cape Premier Alan Winde’s second Energy Digicon ambitious targets were set as he further detailed municipalities and the Western Cape government’s energy plan to ensure resilience and mitigate load shedding impacts on residents and businesses.
The aim of these weekly Digicons is to keep the public informed of what the government is doing in the short, medium, and long term to address rolling blackouts. Winde said the budget for the province’s energy plan would be tabled next week which would signal the go-ahead for their many projects.
Joining the Digicon was former head of Eskom in the Western Cape and current special adviser, Alwie Lester, who said: “We cannot remove load shedding in our lives but what we (as businesses and residents) can do is look at what options we have to buffer load shedding.
“Our strategy looks at two objectives: the first is how do we create immediate load shedding relief for businesses and citizens in the province and secondly, how do we facilitate low reliance on Eskom in the province.”
To realise these goals, Lester said they set fairly ambitious targets over the next few years.
In the short term, the province will look to reduce reliance on Eskom from between 500MW and 750MW by 2025. In the medium-term, they will look to further reduce reliance on Eskom from between 750MW and 1 800MW by 2027.
In the long term, Lester said the idea was to have generation in this province, not dependent on Eskom, up to 5 700MW by 2035.
Clarifying these objectives, Lester said these plans did not incorporate any initiatives sitting with national government, but rather all the plans by private entities and municipalities within the province that looked at electricity generation.
“For us to achieve these objectives, there are couple of areas we need to focus on. The first being the load shedding relief programme, then the provincial integrated resource plan, the demand side management programme, new energy generation programme, and the network development programme,” Lester said.
The premier’s energy digicons over the next few weeks will unpack these programmes and what they mean for residents and businesses.
After meeting with various municipalities to hear about their plans to mitigate load shedding, Winde said one presentation in particular that stood out was from George Municipality.
George mayor Leon van Wyk joined the premier in the digicon on Thursday and elaborated on municipality’s programmes, which it embarked on last year, to become more energy efficient and self-reliant in terms of generating electricity.
“We have been looking at small-scale wheeling, we have enabled small-scale embedded generation and a whole plan that works along with this. Our first priority is to reduce our own consumption through own generation and demand management.”
Van Wyk said their own consumption was about 7MW, and if they could reduce this, they would be able to alleviate one stage of load shedding in George.
kristin.engel@inl.co.za