Sun City’s solar farm triumphs amidst baboons and cranes

Baboons warming their bums in the winter morning and a massive crane were just some of the problems faced by engineers installing a 1.4-megawatt rooftop solar farm.

And the problems are still coming, said Sun City general manager Brett Hoppé. “If you look at the impact on municipalities, Eskom’s revenue stream will be in an interesting quandary.

“Typically, large corporations like us are religious payers and in our area, obviously the mines are massive consumers, but we are fairly substantial in terms of what we consume.”

Peak demand in November

As the home of the Nedbank Golf Challenge, Sun City will see its peak demand in November.

“So, I see a real challenge coming for Eskom. It’s not only about our capacity to generate, it’s also about the income stream from generation,” said Hoppé.

“The other side of it is wheeling and how that’s going to unfurl.”

Tsebo Solutions Group senior engineer for energy solutions TM Lesetla noted that 2 584 photovoltaic panels around 2m x 1m in size were laid flat on the roof of a building.

“We started in March and on 31 July, we switched,” Lesetla said with a proud grin.

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Solar is generating 1.4MW, enough to power 329 average homes, said Hoppé. From January to June this year, Sun City burned through R2.7 billion in diesel – and his plan is to eventually take Sun City offline completely.

According to Lesetla, the solar system is directly tied into Sun City’s grid during the day. “At night, we switch to Eskom,” he said.

Building the 25m-high rooftop solar field was a herculean task. “We had to hire a 100-ton crane to move the panels to the roof,” Lesetla said.

Another problem Tsebo had to work around was the baboons enjoying the sun. But he said with summer coming up, they were not hanging around much.