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The Western Cape Government is working with the Hessequa Municipality to make the town of Riversdale the latest Eskom-free town in South Africa.

Premier Alan Winde bemoaned load shedding during the Western Cape State of the Province Address, saying that Eskom’s failure has cost R49 billion and R61 billion in real GDP since load shedding started.

What was that you said about load shedding not being the end of the world, Sylvia Lucas (the ANC and NCOP deputy chair)?

With the real cost of stage 4 load shedding being close to R43 million per day in the province, the Western Cape is now pushing forward with plans to go ‘off the grid’. Riversdale is next on the list of towns, where a R210 million solar PV project is being implemented over the next three years.

According to Winde, Riversdale will become the first load-shedding-free town in the province, bringing relief to its 22,000 residents.

Three more towns have been noted as working on wind and solar projects. These are being driven ‘through private households and businesses.’ The planned projects are:

• Three 75MW solar farms will be based in the Touws River area;

• Atlantis Foundries and Energy Partners are working together on an extensive embedded solar project, which includes 20,000 ground-mounted solar panels.

• Prescient Investment Management and H1 Holdings are investing in a solar project that will go live next year and could power up to 100,000 homes.

While Eskom deals with unplanned outages, corruption, and just general k*k management, several towns are working on plans to remove themselves from Eskom’s erratic drip-feed of electricity, so towns like Riversdale might become the norm in the near future.

As reported in BusinessTech, Regulatory issues have however hampered several places from implementing energy projects, like Frankfort, whose solar project ran into ‘regulatory trouble’.

At least it is good to see that the Western Cape is not sitting on its hands like the rest of the provinces. Waiting for Eskom to get its act together is like waiting for your ex to call and apologise for cheating on you – it ain’t gonna happen.

[source:businesstech]