Young engineer Nolwazi Zulu says that when she was a teenager, she decided “to go and do something about the regular power outages” that plague her community.
The 25-year-old Zulu woman comes from rural KwaZulu-Natal on the east coast of South Africa.
Like the rest of the country, her home province has endured frequent power outages known as “load shedding” since 2008.
This was caused by South Africa’s aging national grid and its mostly coal-fired power plants struggling to keep up with demand.
To help solve the problem and improve its environmental record, the South African government is now continuing efforts to increase the amount of solar power generation in the country. To this end, it encourages companies in the sector to bid for contracts.
The plan is to secure another 1,000 megawatts of solar power, enough to power around one million households in the country. Added to this is the desire to increase onshore wind power generation by 1,600 megawatts.
Currently, only 11% of South Africa’s electricity comes from renewable sources, mostly wind. So far, just 0.9% comes from solar energy in a country that gets an average of eight to 10 hours of sun each day, compared to the UK’s four.
One company that won one of the solar bids is Art Solar, the only South African-owned solar panel manufacturer. The word art stands for “African Renewable Technology”.
At this company, Ms. Zulu works on the design team while pursuing her studies in Electrical Power Engineering at Durban University of Technology.
In addition to supporting the national grid, she says solar panels can bring power to the many rural homes that are not connected to the grid.
“I want to open a kind of solar branch in Ulundi [where she grew up]and bring solar energy to my village,” says Ms. Zulu. “It’s cheaper and better than the way we live with load shedding and will change so many lives.”
Art Solar from Durban started building solar panels under license from the German company Bosch 12 years ago. It now manufactures panels for both the South African and international markets in partnership with German partner company Talesun.
General manager Viren Gosai says the government’s solar push has given the company confidence to open a new facility capable of producing 650,000 panels a year.
It also supplies homes and businesses, although its panels are more expensive than lower-quality imports, which do not incur import duties.
“Covid-19 and lockdowns have been bad in many ways,” says Mr. Gosai. “But the only positive thing I’ve noticed is that it made people patriotic.
“People want to shop locally, rely on resources at home, and are loyal.”
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A recent high profile contract for Art Solar was the supply of solar panels to a private hospital in Durban last year. This means Ahmed Al-Kadi Hospital is protected from power outages.
Up in East African countries, including Tanzania, solar energy company Zola Electric has developed a power solution that ignores national grids. Instead of connecting solar panels to nationwide power grids, it wants to create independent “mini-grids” for villages and other communities.
Zola CEO Bill Lenihan says we need to “move beyond the old ways of thinking about energy access, especially in Africa”.
He adds that alongside the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, people in emerging markets think a single energy grid might not work.
“Everyone thought, ‘We’re going to build a net.’ Well, you don’t build lattices.
“A hundred years later, people in places like Africa don’t have access to working networks and they won’t get working networks because it’s a flawed technology for emerging markets. Saying this is no longer controversial. “
Back in South Africa, Jay Naidoo, former government minister under Nelson Mandela, is a fan of the idea of such separate mini-grids for the 20% of South African homes that are not connected to state-owned Eskom’s grid.
Today he is a trustee and resident of the Earthrise Trust, an organic farming project in the rural Free State.
“Our goal is to empower rural communities, especially women and youth, who contribute to economic growth,” says Mr. Naidoo. “However, electricity is still an issue, affecting the prospects and self-sufficiency of the farm.
“Imagine if we could have a community micro solar grid and meet our own needs? It could electrify so many communities and create community-owned assets.”
The South African environmental organization Earthlife Africa has been calling for more renewable energies in the country for some time.
“We failed to invest in solar energy,” says Makoma Lekalakala, director of Earthlife. “We would be beyond that [power cuts] Crisis if we had one.”
“Instead, we relied on the narrative that we have coal and coal is the base.”
South Africa should have moved towards solar energy “for a long time”, she says, adding: “We have wasted a lot of time and disregarded the climate commitments that we have made at the international level.”
South Africa’s Department of Mining Resources and Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
With Art Solar planning a big ramp up in production, Ms. Zulu says she’s excited that the company is now actually planning to open an office in her community.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gosai says he is confident about the future of solar energy in the country. “The light in South Africa is fantastic, lots of daylight hours mean a high return on investment. [And] our people support us.”
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