South Africa’s five biggest solar farms comprise more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity, with most of these located in the Northern Cape.
According to the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association, the country currently has over 11,000 megawatts of operational solar photovoltaic capacity across over 2,000 plants.
This is expected to rapidly increase over the coming years, with 39 gigawatts (39,000 MW) to be built by 2030 as part of the country’s Independent Power Producer (IPP) Procurement Programme.
The government initiative has encouraged foreign investment in South Africa’s renewable energy sector, with the country’s largest solar farms being built by foreign companies.
South Africa has two types of solar plants: photovoltaic farms and concentrated solar power (CSP) plants.
The first is what most people think of when discussing a solar farm. PV panels absorb light energy from the sun, causing electrons to move, which generates an electrical current.
CSPs, on the other hand, have several hundred panels placed in a circular pattern to reflect light towards a central container with molten salt, which boils water to generate steam and turn a turbine.
While CSPs offer energy storage, they are substantially more expensive to build.
South Africa’s largest solar farm is the Scatec Kenhardt Solar Power Complex in the Northern Cape with a capacity of 540MW. The complex comprises three solar plants, each with a capacity of 180 MW and covering 879 hectares, or 1,230 rugby fields.
The farm also features 225 MW of batteries and 1.1 GWh of storage capacity. One battery weighs roughly 30 tonnes and is the size of a shipping container.
The Northern Cape’s arid climate and sparse population make it the perfect place to build massive solar farms of this size, which is why Norwegian renewable energy company Scatec decided to create three farms in the province.
Scatec has also built a 273 MW farm in Grootfontein, Western Cape, which shares a similar climate to the Northern Cape in the northern parts of the province.
The farm, which is the second-largest in the country, is expected to generate 700 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of clean energy annually.
Given that the plant was constructed as part of the IPPPP, Scatec has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Eskom.
The company was recently awarded preferred bidder status for 846 MW of solar projects in the reallocation of power capacity under Renewable Energy IPPPP Bid Window 7.
The Grootfontein farm is the only one of South Africa’s top five largest plants to be built outside the Northern Cape.
Solar Capital’s 175 MW farm in De Aar, Northern Cape, is the country’s third-largest and is large enough to provide electricity to approximately 75,000 homes. This was the Southern Hemisphere’s largest solar farm at the time of its construction.
It has over half a million PV modules and occupies an area of more than four square kilometres, taking 28 months to construct and costing R4.8 billion.
The fourth-largest solar farm in the country is Scatec’s Dyason Klip complex, comprising two plants of 86 MW each, giving it a total capacity of 172 MW.
The plants, located just outside Upington, are supposed to form part of a three-plant complex with a combined capacity of 258 MW. However, only the first two have been built so far.
There are four farms tied in fifth place, all of which have a capacity of 100 MW: XiNa Solar One and KaXu Solar One in Pofadder, Karoshoek Solar One in Upington, and Kathu Solar Park in Kathu.
The XiNa Solar One, Karoshoek Solar One, and Kathu Solar Park are all concentrated PV facilities and are located in the Northern Cape.
The KaXu facility, on the other hand, is a CSP. The entire collector surface area of the plant is 800,000 square metres with a molten salt storage capacity of 2.5 hours.
However, despite having all this solar capacity in the Northern Cape, South Africa faces the challenge of wheeling it to other parts of the country, given its lack of the necessary infrastructure to do so.
This is because the energy grid was designed to evacuate energy from Mpumalanga, given the region’s abundance of coal.
Therefore, Energy and Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has stated that South Africa will require approximately R440 billion to construct roughly 14,000 kilometres of new transmission lines over the next decade.
This will also include procuring 133,000 megavolt-amperes of transformer capacity.
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