South Africa: Premier’s 19th Energy Digicon looks at Mossel Bay Municipality’s efforts to address rolling blackouts

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Local governments are playing a vital role in tackling the energy crisis, in partnership with the Western Cape Government (WCG). Municipalities are at the coalface of service delivery, which is suffering due to relentless power blackouts. What are the province’s municipalities doing to protect, as far as possible, essential services during this crisis and reduce their sole reliance on Eskom in the longer term?

Executive Mayor of Mossel Bay, Alderman Dirk Kotze, was the special guest at Premier Alan Winde’s 19th Energy Digicon this week. Ald. Kotze detailed how he and his team are taking short-and long-term measures to keep critical services for residents running amid loadshedding. These interventions include:

• Fitting streetlights with LED bulbs as well as installing solar lighting at public ablution facilities
• Installing solar geysers at new housing projects
• Traffic lights at some intersections are fitted with uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems
• Emergency generators to protect services such as sanitation and water treatment
• Groot Brak River hydropower project
• A rooftop solar strategy, and
• A 30 MW solar plant is in the planning phase

The Mayor explained that the municipality is also looking at gas-to-power projects. “We are busy with talks with PetsoSA. They reckon they can produce gas to generate about 180 MW which will also be a quick solution.”

With emergency funding from the WCG, the municipality is installing three generators to keep services running during loadshedding.

Among the bigger projects, the municipality is investing in the development of mini-grids located near municipal infrastructure, such as waterworks, run on hybrid- solar photovoltaic (PV) systems generating 1 MW of power.

The Premier noted, “We will continue to enable and equip our municipalities with the necessary resources and guidance to make daily life a little easier for residents during blackouts.”

An intervention the WCG will be implementing soon is the rollout of loadshedding kits to help indigent households. “I often think of learners who have to study in the dark. We need to offer them some kind of assistance. In the coming days, we will start distributing over 400 000 of these kits to indigent households across the province” Premier Winde said.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Western Cape Government: Department of the Premier.