The City of Cape Town has awarded a tender for its first solar plant, the Atlantis solar photovoltaic plant. Construction is scheduled to start in August.

The tender was awarded to the Lesedi Technoserve Consortium for engineering, procurement, and construction and should be completed in 12 months.

This is part of the city’s attempt to end load-shedding and offset municipal buildings’ carbon emissions by 2030.

“The project is currently in the detailed design phase, and the transmission of first power into the grid is expected towards the end of 2025,” said mayoral committee member for energy Beverley van Reenen.

It also follows the city’s announcement that it will invest R4 billion into upgrading its grid to cope with a dynamic, decentralised generation ecosystem.

Once construction is completed, the plant will feed 7MW of electricity into the grid by connecting to a nearby main substation.

The plant will be the first utility-scale renewable energy project in Cape Town and will be operated by the city.

“Apart from [achieving our vision of] reducing the dependency on Eskom through our various programmes and of enabling cleaner, more affordable sources of energy, we are also extremely focused on boosting our local economy to drive job creation,” Van Reenen stated.

The city hopes to achieve energy security by 2050 through initiatives like the Atlantis Solar Project.

In addition to achieving this, the city hopes to offset all municipal buildings’ electricity consumption with renewable energy by 2030.

The city still purchases the majority of its electricity from Eskom.

However, it has introduced a cash-for-power programme that allows households and businesses to apply to earn cash for excess power generated by their solar PV systems.

“In the short-term, we are planning for four stages of load-shedding protection by 2026,” Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said when announcing the programme.

“[This is] as we make the great transition from unreliable, costly, and fossil fuel-based Eskom energy to an increasingly decentralised supply of reliable, cost-effective, carbon-neutral energy from a diverse range of suppliers.”

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