While the electricity increases for the next three years are expected to negatively affect the agricultural industry, farmers have the capacity to run renewable energy projects on their farms to not only reduce their costs, but support the national grid. Eskom has announced tariff increases of 9.41%, 8.1% and 5.2% for the next three financial years.
Nicol Jansen, Agri SA chairman: economics, says farmers can apply to implement renewable energy for their own use, while remaining connected to the grid and feeding any additional power into the national grid. Farmers must register with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) in order to do this, for an application fee of R200. “There are already about 400 farmer applications in the system and there is great interest in building solar capacity for this purpose,” he says.
Jansen notes that both Eskom and Nersa need capacity to process the 400-odd applications from farmers efficiently. “Once those applications have all been approved, we [the agricultural industry] could reach a targeted 1 000 megawatts of power and it is quite possible that the contribution of the agricultural industry to the national power grid could prevent Stage 1 load shedding,” he says.
Source: moneyweb.co.za
