South Africa is on its way to becoming a leader in the green energy revolution with a giant solar park which, once fully built, will be the largest in the world.
The multibillion rand park – earmarked for the hot, dry Northern Cape province – will be built over thousands of hectares and provide 5 000 megawatts (five gigawatts) of electricity, which will be fed into the national grid.
The park will be built in stages over nine years, but the first sections will be operational as early as 2012. Massive job creation, lucrative private-sector investments, local industry development and a cleaner, more secure power supply are among the benefits of a large-scale park such as this.
The project is a partnership between government, state power utility Eskom and the Clinton Climate Change Initiative (CCI). An investors’ conference, to run from 28 to 29 October, is hoped to draw in additional stakeholders from the private sector
