Environmental groups applaud Ramaphosa’s plan for renewable energy

Environmental communities have applauded President Cyril Ramaphosa’s plan to tackle the power crisis, following his announcement that the licensing threshold of 100 megawatts (MW) will be removed.

Greenpeace Africa said, after years of campaigning, the president’s decision to remove the arbitrary threshold for renewable energy generation proved renewable energy was the answer to both the energy and climate crises.

“This speaks to the climate issues because SA has a very high emissions profile. We are actually the highest-polluting country on the continent [according to] the code we are using,” said Nhlanhla Sibisi, the organisation’s climate and energy campaigner.

“So, by removing the pressure, it gives us an opportunity to also improve on our emissions profile [that] has been part of the climate agreement.”

Advocate Stefanie Fick, Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse accountability division executive director, said the organisation would keep an eye on government to ensure the relaxation of the licence requirements for private energy projects did not open the door for Karpowerships.

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She said the president was quite clear when he spoke about this and referred to low to medium risk, as the intention by relaxing it was mainly about green power.

“By removing the licence and threshold, he was not giving way to more pollution, but maybe just promoting green energy, as you can imagine starting a coal factory somewhere, you may have significant environmental challenges,” she said.

During the family meeting in June last year, Ramaphosa said the government had raised the licensing threshold for new embedded generation projects from 1MW to 100MW. This removed the licensing requirement for generation projects up to 100MW, which were connected to the grid.

“This measure enabled these generators to have the ability to sell electricity to one or more customers, such as factories, mines or data centres,” Ramaphosa said.

“Last year, we announced the raising of the licensing threshold to 100MW. This move was widely welcomed. It has unlocked a pipeline of more than 80 confirmed private sector projects with a combined capacity of over 6 000MW.”

He said government was already working with the industry to accelerate the most advanced projects, several of which were entering construction, and these changes had fundamentally changed the generation landscape.

“Following the success of this reform and the enthusiasm shown by the private sector, we will remove the licensing threshold for embedded generation completely,” he added.

Sibisi said “unfortunately” this was not going to happen overnight in terms of seeing improvement, but it was encouraging, as the country was heading in the right direction – in line with what other countries were already doing.

However, Sasol needed to be addressed as well.