Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.
The City of Cape Town’s municipal solar plant in Atlantis, Cape Town, is now one-sixth complete.
The facility is the first utility-scale renewable energy project in Cape Town and the first-of-its-kind in South Africa to be owned and operated by a city.
Since construction on the project began in October 2024, around 2 400 solar panels have been installed.
The Atlantis plant will include a total of 12 800 solar panels, capable of generating 7MW, with potential to scale up to 10MW when it is completed. This capacity will be fed to a nearby substation and then directly into the grid.
“This site isn’t only significant because of the fact that it’s the first municipal solar plant in South Africa, it will also include an 8MW battery storage system. The battery energy storage system is essentially a pilot project to eventually incorporate energy storage within the city’s network,” explained alderman Xanthea Limberg, mayoral committee member for energy, while on a site walk-through yesterday.
The R200 million project is expected to take about a year to complete.
“There is still a lot of work to be done here but once it’s up and running, this facility will not only be providing cleaner power but also cheaper power to the Cape Town grid,” said mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who also visited the Atlantis construction site this week.
“Our mission is firstly to improve security of supply so we are less affected by load-shedding. Secondly, the goal is to bring down the price of power over time.”
Hill-Lewis noted that this project has been in the making since he became mayor of Cape Town in 2021.
“At the time, there was terrible load-shedding and we realised that we needed to buy more power and also come up with ways to generate our own power so that we were less reliant on Eskom. We started the process of buying power from the open market, through independent power producers, and parallel to that we planned the construction of this plant and another, bigger facility in Somerset West.
“At the time, the project was largely driven by a need to alleviate the disruption caused by load-shedding. Since then, we’ve had a dramatic improvement in the load-shedding situation, but now we’re all talking about the cost of power in South Africa.
“While a facility like this is only capable of generating a tiny fraction of the power the city uses, our hope is that as we expand our own sources of power, we can distribute it throughout the city and really start to benefit consumers by bringing the cost of electricity down.”
This project is especially significant for Cape Town because it forms part of the city’s efforts to achieve net-zero carbon municipal buildings by 2030, added Limberg.
“The renewable energy certificates generated from this solar project will meaningfully offset carbon emissions associated with the city’s operations.”
Additionally, Hill-Lewis highlighted the impact this project is having on the local Atlantis community. “Everything we do in Cape Town is about growing our economy and helping more people find work.
“One of the nice things about this project is that much of the work is being done by people from the local community. These people are being employed and upskilled ,so that they can move on from this project to new opportunities with real renewable energy industry skills.”
