The success of South Africa’s energy transition depends, in part, on deepening and stronger collaboration between government and the renewable energy industry to fill out policy implementation gaps and drive investment.
This according to Chief Executive Officer of the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), Niveshen Govender, who participated in a panel discussion on the sidelines of the third G20 Energy Transitions Working Group (ETWG) meeting held in the North West.
“From an industry perspective… there are a number of requirements that we have to work on with government to ensure that we implement. I think we are doing a good job… We have the energy one stop shop that is now a single point of access to all permitting. You have the Department of Energy and Electricity with a minister [Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa] who is very active in unblocking [challenges].
“We have seen government’s readiness of market and allowing for business to come in, invest [and] implement on cost, on time - as quickly as possible - to get those electrons into place,” Govender said.
He noted that the industry and government stand at the same point with a “lot of commonalities” between the two.
“[This is] in terms of ensuring that we have access to energy per country, we have affordable energy to actually use, we have security of supply so we don’t go back to load shedding and we have sustainability in the long-term for reducing our carbon emissions.
“The Minister [Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa] very succinctly articulated… the importance of the energy mix and the importance of renewable energy being central to the decarbonisation of that energy mix,” Govender said.
However, despite these commonalities, misalignments still remain.
“We have very good policies in South Africa, top tier policies. They give good direction and good guidance. It takes everything into consideration… for the people of South Africa to make sure that we’re leaving no one behind.
“Where we do struggle is implementation of these policies. I think the biggest one of those is investor readiness. If you are not engaging industries, your readiness is going to [be impacted] as to what does the investor need to make that policy a reality,” the industry expert said.
He described the current developmental pace of the industry as an “evolution of the energy landscape”.
“We’ve moved from, essentially, the monopoly that Eskom was into public procurement of renewable energy and IPPs [Independent Power Producers]. Now we’re moving into bilateral agreements between these IPPs and… users. We’re even moving one step further into a liberalised energy market where you have traders and aggregators playing a role.
“We see this evolution of the electricity space that’s changing how we do business. It’s changing how we look at the landscape and energy planning,” Govender said. – SAnews.gov.za
