South Africa picks bidders for emergency power generation

• 3 years ago (2021-03-19)
• David Flin

Africa 303 Renewables 751

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South Africa has announced the preferred bidders to provide emergency power to boost supply to heal Eskom deal with rolling blackouts. Gwede Mantashe, Energy Minister for South Africa, said that the eight bidders will provide a total of 1845 MW from various technologies to be connected to the grid by August 2022. The projects will have private sector investment of $3 billion under the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Procurement Programme, and this should reach financial close by the end of July 2020.

The emergency power bids were awarded to ACWA Power Projects , Oya Energy, Umoyilanga, Mulilo Total has been awarded two projects, and Karpowership has been awarded three projects. The projects use technologies that include solar, wind, LNG, and battery storage.

In a separate process, a request for proposals for an extra 2600 MW from renewable sources in a fifth bid window has been announced. The fifth bid window calls for 1600 MW of wind and 1000 MW of solar, and will close for submissions of August 4th.

Eskom Holdings has said that generation by independent producers is essential to meet demand after South Africa experienced record power cuts in 2020, with more outages expected in 2021.