The 1-hectare ground-mounted Solar System will be erected at the Pretoria campus of Technology Think Tank CSIR / Construction has already started / Grid connection is scheduled for end of August

The juwi group is expanding its solar footprint in South Africa. By June 1st juwi Renewable Energies (Pty) Ltd, a Cape Town based subsidiary of the German project developer for renewable energies, has commenced the construction of a 558 kW capacity ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR) Pretoria campus. CSIR is one of the leading scientific and technology research, development and implementation organizations in Africa.

juwi sees this EPC-project as an instrumental step towards an era of distributed energy generation, where energy will not only be generated by power utilities in a centralized top-down manner, but in a distributed and varied manner where energy consumers will also become small scale producers or 'prosumers'.

Greg Austin, Managing Director of juwi South Africa said: "This is a flagship project for juwi, as it will set the benchmark for distributed renewable energy in South Africa. The CSIR, being a scientific body, will verify the performance of this plant and share the knowledge with the broader community".

"By pushing the market towards the lowest cost per Kilowatt-hour (kWh) offered over the project's full lifetime, the CSIR has demonstrated that it is possible for government and public entities to procure smaller scale renewable energy facilities at lifetime cost rates highly comparable to large-scale facilities such as the various larger PV power plants in the Northern Cape," said Austin.

Austin stated that juwi and the CSIR are really pleased with the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from this project. Using the CSIR's LCOE model, juwi has been able to achieve a cost of 6 eurocents (0.83 Rand) per kWh over the lifetime of the new PV solar facility for the turnkey EPC contract. The 1-hectare tracking solar system will produce over 3.5 million kWh in the first three years.

An important measurable where Renewable Energy trumps traditional sources of electricity such as fossil and nuclear, is the timeframe from construction to production. "The CSIR PV plant will be generating electricity by the end of August 2015 - within 12 weeks of the start of construction," said Austin. And added that juwi will also provide operations and maintenance (O and M) services on the facility for three years after full operation.