Cape Town - In Premier Alan Winde’s third weekly Energy Digicon, he was joined by the chief director of the provincial Disaster Management and Fire and Rescue Service, Colin Deiner, where they detailed the province’s blackout contingency plan and highlighted short-term energy resilience projects that would be rolled out soon.
Deiner said there was a low probability of a total blackout, but should it ever occur, it would be with virtually no warning and the duration depended on what went wrong, but in the worst-case scenario, it would take 14 days to stabilise and return the power grid to operation.
“Should there be a complete blackout, the Provincial Disaster Management Centre (PDMC) has a number of priority areas: water; sewerage; transport and mobility; health; emergency services; communications/ telecommunications and information technology; commercial industrial; law enforcement and security services; and fuel security,” Deiner said.
He said that if a blackout happened, it would be because of a sequence of events or a huge event that would lead to a cascading collapse of the generation and transmission system.
Possible risks that could lead to a blackout are primary energy constraints; generation plant performance; infrastructure damage; and industrial or social unrest.
The premier and his special adviser on energy, Alwie Lester, also detailed about 20 energy-resilient initiatives taking place in the province.
These will be supported by the R1.1 billion that MEC Mireille Wenger allocated in the Western Cape budget on Tuesday, towards making the province energy secure.
The initiatives were categorised according to load-shedding impact reduction; green economy ecosystem support; project preparation support; grid, generation and financing planning; capacity to implement; LED lighting and solar PV installations for hospitals, facilities, some schools, and so on.
Lester said residents and businesses would start experiencing relief from the province’s short-term energy initiatives within six to 12 months. He said some of these short-term initiatives included incentivising for SMMEs to go off-grid into alternative energy systems.
“Then we have our mobile containerised solar battery units (from 1MW to 400MW), where you can put solar PV, linked to batteries and inverters, in the container, which will be connected to the municipal grid, and effectively what we will do is reduce any load that we take off from Eskom and supplement that by going for the containerised solar PV,” Lester said.
Lester explained that they would effectively run huge cell farms. About 1.8 hectares was needed to generate 1MW of solar, and that would then be linked to a battery system and an inverter system that would be plugged into the municipal network.
“As the sun goes down, the batteries will start up and start to power that farm based on the battery that’s available. That is one system we are looking at. You could do exactly the same for wind and for other sources of energy. That is just a storage facility that you use,” Lester explained.
The premier added that the provincial government has implemented a “Proposal Funnel” on their website where the public can submit their proposals for workable solutions to assist in addressing the power crisis.