MINERAL Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe yesterday faced criticism that registration as an embedded generation facility to produce up to 100MW of electricity is taking almost as long as the licensing, but he said it should take no longer than two months.
Mantashe said, however, that his department had “not seen a single one registered up till now”, this is in spite of the fact that the government had opened the process up to 100MW from 50MW, specifically because it had already received applications from mining companies to produce more than 50MW of electricity. Mantashe was responding to questions from the audience at the Solar Power Africa 2022 conference held in the Cape Town’s International Convention Centre yesterday.
It emerged from questions in the audience that companies that wished to take advantage of the special dispensation granted by the government last year to allow private companies to generate up to 100MW of power without requiring a licence, were finding that the process was taking as much effort and time as licensing used to.
Mantashe said if any companies were taking longer than two months to obtain a registration, “they need to come speak to me”.
He said the laws had recently been amended to allow for the creation of a single independent electricity transmission company, which would become a market and wheeler of electricity produced from a variety of generation methods. The formation of this transmission company was based on experience from a similar model adopted in the Netherlands. He said the renewable energy sector had made good progress and attracted significant investment, although he would have liked the progress to have been faster.
He said it was “unnatural” to try to step in the way of cities buying their own electricity, and that the national government would not stand in the way of any cities with plans to do this.
Both Cape Town and Johannesburg had generated their own electricity in the past, he said. Mantashe said the development of the renewable energy sector should not take place without the concomitant development of local manufacturing for the sector, and the sector should not be reliant on, for example, imported spare parts.
He said the renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), launched in 2010, had diversified energy-mix and introduced new technologies, thereby transforming the landscape of electricity generation, trading, and access to the national grid.
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