The City of Cape Town on Thursday signed a 20-year contract to buy wind energy from a yet-to-be-built generating farm at Darling on the West Coast.
”Ultimately we would like to see Cape Town become one of the world’s leaders in sustainable energy,” said city mayor Helen Zille in a statement issued at the signing ceremony.
The ”green” electricity is to be sold at a premium to consumers willing to pay extra to play their part in combating global warming.
The first phase of the Darling wind farm, which has been given the status of a national pilot project by the Department of Minerals and Energy, will cost R70-million, Darling Wind Power chief executive Hermann Oelsner said.
Laying the foundations for the first phase, consisting of four 1,3MW turbines, will begin in November.
Oelsner said the project was being funded by Danish Development Aid, the Central Energy Fund, equity shareholders including the Central energy Fund and the Development Bank of South Africa.
The contract with the city — the farm’s first signed-up customer — had been vital in unlocking funding for the project, he said.
”It’s a reward for ten years of a lot of people putting in and believing in this,” he said. He anticipated the first wind electricity would come on line in just under a year from now.
Project manager for Cape Town’s ”green electricity” programme, Brian Jones, said the contract committed the city to buying an estimated 13,2-gigawatt hours of electricity a year — roughly half the amount consumed by the city’s civic centre.
He said that though making a 20-year commitment was risky, the city had conducted market surveys that showed ”reasonable support” for the purchase of green electricity, while a five year, R1,8-million-a-year subsidy from the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Environmental Facility would soften the blow on the city as the market developed.
He said that although the city had used small amounts of ”green” electricity before, for special events such as conferences, none of it had been generated in the Western Cape.
The wind-generated electricity will cost residential consumers 25c more than the 40c a kilowatt-hour they were currently paying.
Oelsner said this price was nonetheless cheaper than the cost of electricity from newly commissioned coal-fired and gas turbine power stations.
”Green” electricity is not kept separate from other electricity when it is supplied to consumers. It is fed into the general electricity grid.
The Darling output will be audited, and the city will sell off a corresponding amount of electricity as ”green” electricity.
When the Koeberg nuclear power station is working at full capacity, it supplies roughly half of the Western Cape’s current electricity demand.
The other half comes from sources outside the province, mostly coal-fired power stations. — Sapa