Cape Town - Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis on Monday announced that the City of Cape Town has secured funding from the C40 City Finance Facility (CFF) for two major projects, the first being R1.2 billion towards designing, building and operating a solar PV (photovoltaic) plant with battery storage in Paardevlei, outside Somerset West.
This is expected to produce 60MW of renewable energy and protect Cape Town from a full stage of load shedding. It forms part of “Decarbonising the city’s grid through solar farming and energy efficiency”, one of the City’s two successful projects to receive funding from the CFF, which offers cities technical and financial assistance to develop climate change mitigation and adaptation projects.
Hill-Lewis said: “With the help of C40 we are starting the design and the technical specifications of the project and the idea is to have it built and connected to the grid by 2026.”
There are a number of new sources of power that the City is buying and as all of these start connecting to the grid, together they will help the City reduce the stages of load shedding and achieve its goal of being load shedding free by 2026 – however, if more projects come online sooner than anticipated, Hill-Lewis said they could say goodbye to load shedding sooner.
City sustainable energy markets department manager Shane Prins said that the City was contributing R447 million to this solar farm from its R2.3 billion budget to end load shedding over three years.
The rest is being funded by Germany, the UK, the Agence Française de Development (AFD), and is being implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the City.
The second project has been granted R10 million towards cleaning and improving the health of two river catchments in Cape Town: the Diep River catchment and the big and little Lotus River catchment which are both badly polluted by, and victim to, illegal dumping.
This will begin in the next few months and forms part the City’s liveable urban waterway and green infrastructure programmes to enhance the health of targeted catchments and increase flood and climate change resilience in Cape Town.
Hill-Lewis said that water projects such as these would help ensure Cape Town’s long-term sustainability and it could not happen soon enough, as investment in this space has been insufficient in the past.
German Consul-General Tanya Werheit added that achieving climate commitments was becoming increasingly difficult and thus these projects promoting a green and just transition, particularly in Africa where there was increased risk to climate change and a need for inclusive climate protection, needed to be implemented with urgency.
