Cape Town, South Africa
South Africa’s cities seize renewables initiative
Municipalities are resorting to direct procurement as the government fails to narrow the generation gap
Cape Town’s mayor announced in mid-February that South Africa’s second-largest city was inviting private developers to install 300MW of renewables capacity in an attempt to avoid the load-shedding carried out by beleaguered state power company Eskom. Attempts to bridge the multi-gigawatt gap in supply by the heavily indebted utility, together with stricter emissions-reduction targets adopted last year, are driving an accelerated build-out of renewables nationwide. Nonetheless, the political sensitivity of the move away from historic dependence on domestically mined coal as the mainstay of the energy mix remains a brake on the sector’s development. The way was first paved for city leaders to
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