Workers carry a solar panel for installation at the Karoo Fresh Produce (Pty) Ltd. farm in Groenfontein, South Africa, on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. Sun Exchange invites investors to buy solar cells at a project of their choice, where the solar energy customers pay a fee for use, with part of that paid back to investors in either South African rand or Bitcoin. “Myself and my peer from China will be concluding those agreements and the timelines are really that we should be able to get significant investment into the ground in the next six months,” he said.
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The discussions with the Chinese officials will mainly center around the localization of components for solar panel manufacturing, said Silas Zimu, the minister’s energy adviser. An agreement could potentially result in a South African production hub being set up by next year, he said.
Eskom has estimated that 53 gigawatts of clean energy capacity will be needed by 2032 to make up for coal-fired power stations that are decommissioned. Still, the government has prioritized fixing the utility’s existing facilities and extending their lifespans to try and keep blackouts to a minimum.
The minister said he is confident the outages, known locally as loadshedding, will end and predicted that an additional 4,700 megawatts of power would be added to the grid in the next few months. That would help increase the energy availability factor, a measure of usable capacity, toward 70%.