The South Africa government aims to ramp up the amount of renewable energy in the country by offering another 8,100 megawatts of contracts to developers.
In the recent fourth round of bidding under the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme, a total of 1.2 gigawatts was offered for solar, wind, hydro and biomass projects. Winning bidders included Enel Green Power, SunEdison and BioTherm were amongst successful bidders.
Financial closure for the latest round is expected by the end of this year, and the projects are targeted for completion by November 2016. To date, the country has offered 79 projects with a total capacity of 5.2 gigawatts under the different phases of the REIPPPP.
Tina Joemat-Pettersson, the Minister for Energy, said that a Request for Further Proposals will be offered by June 2015 for 1,800MW of capacity from all technologies. It will be open to unsuccessful bidders from all previous round of the REIPPPP.
The fifth round of the REIPPPP will be offered in the second quarter of 2016. Joemat-Pettersson said that she will be seeking government approval for a further 6,300 megawatts of clean energy in future REIPPPP rounds.
The government has also introduced a Small Projects Programme which seeks to procure renewable energy from projects that are between 1MW and 5MW in size. A procurement process, seeking to procure 50MW of the 200MW determined for small projects, is currently underway. 29 bids have been received totalling 139MW and evaluations of bids will be finalised within this month.