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