South Africa bets on renewables

Faced with spiralling energy costs and growing demand, South Africa is investing heavily in green energy, but without enough cables to transmit the power, it faces a 'gridlock' that could stop it reaching its full renewable potential. President Cyril Ramaphosa opened the latest green energy project last month, a 155-megawatt wind farm in Mpumalanga province, calling it part of a "clean energy revolution". "Electricity that is affordable, reliable and increasingly clean is the lifeblood of a growing economy," he said. South Africa is planning to add 105 gigawatts of generating capacity to the grid by 2039, including through nuclear, wind and solar power - more than doubling its current capacity. But experts say there is one big impediment; a lack of transmission lines to carry all that energy. Thousands of green energy projects are currently unable to connect to the national grid at all. "This 'gridlock' is the single biggest hurdle to unleashing the coun

try's renewable potential, creating a significant risk of stalling the green transition and even triggering further electricity and economic crises," Wayne Cowie, CEO at Energy Exchange South Africa, a private sector energy trader, wrote on the company's website in June. "Grid capacity in most high-resource green energy generation areas has reached saturation, making it difficult to deliver renewable power to those who need it," he said. To fix this, the government says thousands of kilometres of power lines need to be added to the grid in the next 10 years at an estimated cost of 400 billion rand (£18 billion).