Free State town forced to dump excess solar power ‘to protect the national electricity network’

Just because you’ve had a bright idea doesn’t mean the powers that be will let you bring it to light, as a small farming community in the Free State found out to its cost after it lost a court battle to dodge load shedding.

Residents and business owners in Frankfort now face renewed debilitating load shedding, despite excess energy available to them from four private solar farms in the area.

Portions of the solar panels will be shut down, leaving residents at the mercy of nonperforming Eskom, in the main because the local Mafube municipality failed to support a court application by its own service provider, Rural Maintenance, to retain control over the implementation of load shedding in the area.

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Eskom early yesterday announced generating units at Tutuka, Kriel, Duvha and Kendal power stations had failed, bumping SA back onto stage 6 load shedding.

In the afternoon, it announced the country would bounce between stages 3 and 4 until Monday morning, after which all bets are off as to what stage the week would begin on.

As of today, SA will have endured 110 days of load shedding so far in 2023, compared to 129 in 2020 and 2021 combined.

Self load shedding

Eskom spokesperson Stefanie Jansen van Rensburg said: “Eskom approved Rural Free State’s [RFS] application to implement self load shedding on 25 January.”

Self load shedding allows a qualifying municipality to protect its critical loads, such as sewerage systems and water pumps, from interruptions.

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“RFS began implementing self load shedding on 1 February and problems between the two parties emerged when RFS introduced ‘voiding’, a term [it] created to describe a situation where they do not implement load shedding as per the approved schedules during daytime hours when their solar PV plant is in optimal operation,” Jansen van Rensburg said.

“Eskom rejected this proposal and attempted to help RFS understand why… Rural Maintenance opted to institute legal processes against Eskom.”

A RFS spokesperson told Saturday Citizen it had intended to supply electricity to, as a first step, only the areas to be load shed.

Francois Bosch said: “The community could afford to supply more power than what was required to keep those areas to be shut down, alive.”

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Frankfort cannot afford the R160 million to go completely off load shedding. The community managed to scrape together R100 million to at least supply power to the areas to be load shed, which in anybody’s book would be deemed a constructive initiative.

‘Voiding’

Rural Maintenance (under RFS) had been contracted by Mafube to manage its electricity distribution for 25 years. The company “fine-tuned” the schedules and was able to keep the power supply supporting water and sewerage services intact, as well as accommodate the needs of households and businesses.

It started utilising power from its four solar farms to supplement the Eskom power supply to Frankfort during the day at a lower cost.

Whenever the supply from the solar farms exceeded the amount of capacity to be cut during load shedding, it would keep the lights on. This is called “voiding”, which Eskom objected to.

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Jansen van Rensburg said the generation capacity of the solar plant was not sufficient to cover all the electricity needs of the town during load shedding.

“A portion of the town’s requirements are still supplied by Eskom,” she said.

“As in the rest of the country, the Eskom-supplied electricity to Frankfort is also subject to load shedding.

“If RFS was able to substitute the Eskom-supplied portion through alternative sources, such as from battery storage or another generation facility that is only employed during a power outage, they would have been able to eliminate the need for load shedding.”

IPPs welcomed

Jansen van Rensburg said Eskom welcomed the use of electricity from independent power producers which would assist in alleviating load shedding.

“What Eskom requires from RFS as a responsible participant in the national grid is to comply with the requirements of the code of practice in order to protect the national electricity network in the interest of the country.”

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Bosch said SA found itself “in unprecedented times and we need responsible and credible solutions which are in fact doable”.

– amandaw@citizen.co.za. Additional reporting Moneyweb