The seventh bidding round of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) has opened for interested parties.
South Africa’s Department for Mineral Resource and Energy (DMRE) formally opened the window on Thursday (14 December) with a request for proposal (RfP) seeking 1.8GW of solar PV capacity from independent power producers.
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The application process for the seventh round of the REIPPP is to remain open until 30 April 2024, however the last date for bidders to apply for a cost estimate letter has been set for 31 January 2024.
Awarded projects in this round will have 24 months since commercial close to complete and connect to the grid the projects, as the government aims to promote projects that are fully developed.
A notice published on the country’s IPP Procurement Programme confirms the need for non-refundable deposits of ZAR25,000 (US$1,380) per prospective project to be paid before documents can be submitted.
A map with the grid capacity available in each province has been also provided by state-owned utility Eskom and can be accessed here.
Interest in this upcoming REIPPP remains to be seen as solar PV projects in South Africa have been developed for the private sector (Premium subscription) in the past months, coupled with previous rounds of the programme facing serious delays in signing contracts with state-owned utility Eskom.
Norwegian IPP Scatec, which was awarded a winning bid in the fifth round with 273MW of solar PV, commissioned a solar-plus-storage project in the country earlier this week. Located in the Northern Cape province, the project will have an installed capacity of 540MW for solar PV and a battery energy storage system (BESS) with a capacity of 225MW/1,140MWh. Last year, the project secured a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Eskom to deliver 150MW of power to the national grid between 5am and 9:30pm.
The combination of solar PV with battery storage will allow for dispatchable power to be supplied during peak demand from the battery and improve grid stability, an issue that has been persistent in South Africa for years and for which the government unveiled a raft of measures to bolster the deployment of renewables in July 2022.
The fifth round of the programme signed 975MW of PPAs with 13 solar projects around this time last year.