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- Redefine Properties' R65 million solar rooftop project at the Massmart distribution centre in Cape Town is expected to be roughly the size of three rugby fields.
- The rooftop solar forms part of the City of Cape Town's pilot wheeling project, and installation will start in October.
- Power generated will be fed to properties Redefine owns, including Kenilworth Centre and Blue Route Mall.
- For climate change news and analysis, go to News24 Climate Future.
Rollout of Cape Town's wheeling project - launched as part of a set of measures to address load shedding - is getting well under way, with the installation of a massive rooftop solar PV project set to begin within weeks.
Wheeling involves having power generated at one site and then transported across the grid infrastructure (either owned by Eskom or a municipality like the City of Cape Town) to the point where it will be used, like a mine or a shopping centre.
The CoCT announced in June that 15 companies would be participating in its approved pilot, selling electricity to 40 commercial consumers using the city’s grid.
READ | Amazon, Redefine Properties sign up for Cape Town's latest load shedding solution
Redefine Properties' project, mentioned above, has installation scheduled to start in October 2023. It will be on Redefine's Brackengate 2 property in Cape Town's northern suburbs, which is occupied by Massmart and used for its distribution centre.
The distribution centre already relies on a solar PV installation for some of its power needs. But there is still a lot of space on the rooftop for more solar panels – more than 27 000 square meters of them, or close to the area occupied by three rugby fields.
Redefine's project is expected to have 8.8 gigawatt-hours wheeled to the grid annually, with power wheeled or transported to Kenilworth Centre and Blue Route Mall – both in the southern suburbs of Cape Town – as well as office building Towers in the central business district.
The plant itself is estimated to cost around R65 million, together with R21 million in upgrades to the City of Cape Town's grid infrastructure. Total capital expenditure will amount to some R86 million.
Cape Town's wheeling pilot - which was first announced in 2022 and got the go-ahead this year - is a South African first in the battle to address load shedding. But wheeling is rapidly gaining traction, with multiple options now available.
While Redefine's project is a traditional wheeling arrangement – involving a bilateral agreement between two parties, namely the power producer and the buyer – mobile operator Vodacom has signed on the dotted line for another SA first: a virtual wheeling deal with Eskom.
Where traditional wheeling has a one-to-one relationship, virtual wheeling has a many-to-many relationship. In other words, a buyer or offtaker of electricity would contract with or buy power from more than one independent power producer.
Traditional wheeling does not cater for multiple generators and multiple offtakers or buyers, as virtual wheeling does.
READ | ANALYSIS | How Eskom's new 'virtual wheeling' is a game changer
Vodacom's virtual wheeling agreement with Eskom follows a pilot and testing phase last year, and the mobile company believes the blueprint for virtual wheeling that has been co-developed with Eskom can be used by others in the private sector.
The mobile operator said that because it had 15 000 distributed low-voltage sites across the country that are linked to 168 municipalities, the complexity of this arrangement had prevented it from accessing large-scale renewable energy from IPPs.
"The virtual wheeling solution addresses these challenges," Vodacom explained in a statement. The company will now be able to secure contracts with various independent power producers to meet its energy needs - with the initial phase helping it to move around 30% of Vodacom SA's power demand onto renewable sources.
Sitho Mdlalose, CEO of Vodacom South Africa, says Vodacom is "working hard" at supplementary solutions.
CEO Shameel Josoob added: "Converting our existing fossil fuel-based electricity supplies directly with on-site renewables is limited by technical constraints that are difficult to scale. We explored a traditional wheeling option, but this had numerous limitations, which we believed could be overcome by reimagining the problem and using technology to solve the issue."
