On Wednesday 6 April Stellenbosch Municipality became one of the first municipalities to install solar panels on municipal property successfully, in a quest to free-up the City of Oaks from load shedding.
“Today we take another step in our promise to make Stellenbosch load shedding-free.
“I am thrilled to join our engineers and energy service providers to install one of our first sets of solar panels on municipal property today,” Executive Mayor Gesie van Deventer said at the installation ceremony.
She pointed out that South Africa’s energy crisis is also an economic one, and it has become imperative for municipalities to start investing in alternative energy sources.
“The facts are clear. Solar power is a clean and affordable source of electricity that can be used to generate at the scale required by large economies, while emitting insignificant amounts of carbon.”
She added “it is sad that we have come to accept load shedding as a fact of life in South Africa, for we’ve now been living with rolling blackouts for 15 years.”
Solar panels (Photovoltaic (PV) panels) are being installed at several key municipal properties. As part of the municipality’s plans to reduce its reliance on Eskom and co-generating electricity in a sustainable manner, the municipality has appointed a service provider to install solar panels at its properties, including the Van Der Stel Sports Grounds, Stellenbosch Town Hall, administrative buildings, municipal depot and the Traffic Department. Van Deventer said work should finish by the end of June 2022, after which the next phase will start.
“These panels will produce roughly 400 kW of electricity per day and although this is only a small drop in the vast ocean that is Eskom’s unreliable energy supply, it is a massive step in the right direction for our town.
“In Stellenbosch we say no longer! Let me be clear, with this process we cannot yet break away from Eskom completely, but at least it’s a first step in the process to end load shedding.”
She added that Stellenbosch Municipality can become a more resilient municipality, one which augments the electricity supply to keep the lights on when load shedding hits.
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