A solar light at the end of the Eskom tunnel?

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SPONSORED | Innovative business practices and the growth of renewable energy sources could help to resolve SA’s power crisis, writes Andre Wepener, head of power and infrastructure Investec

in Germany. It looked at the effects of electrification on households in Rwanda, as well as on firms, health centres and schools in that country's rural areas. It found that, contrary to expectations, electrification reduced expenditure on energy.

The study concluded that because of the relatively low levels of energy consumption in rural areas – a mere 2kWh per month, per person – off-grid solutions like solar would make more sense.There has been much debate about whether renewables will cost South Africans more."There is a lot of political noise about this, but the cost of renewables is coming down," Wepener says.

Wepener says the cost has dropped even more in recent rounds of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme , where tariffs were bid as low as 60c–65c per kilowatt-hour. Consumers in some regions in SA are paying as much as R2.20 per kilowatt-hour.Already there are good news stories to be told regarding renewables in SA. The Karoo town of De Aar in the Northern Cape supplies Eskom with 85,458 megawatt-hours of energy a year, enough to supply more than 19,000 average households.

 

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