Cape Town - The Oelsner Group would begin supplying electricity generated by windmills to the Cape Town city council from early next year, the first power of its kind to be generated on a commercial basis in this country, according to Herman Oelsner, the chairman of Oelsner Group and vice-president of the World Wind Association.
Interviewed at the World Wind Energy Conference and Renewable Energy Exhibition yesterday, Oelsner said he had left his sheet metal business in Johannesburg some time ago and had planned to retire quietly in the Cape.
Instead, he spent the next seven years researching and getting together a R70 million project, dubbed the Sustainable Energy and Employment Scheme, in the village of Darling, along the west coast just outside Cape Town.
The main part of the project was wind turbines to generate electricity cost effectively.
This project had reached the stage where construction of the first four turbines, each generating 1.3 megawatts of electricity, which would supply electricity to Cape Town for the next 20 years, would begin early in February.
Further into the future, the plan was to build 50 turbines capable of generating 2.3MW each, which would produce 115MW, which is about the same generating capacity of the proposed nuclear pebble bed modular reactor.
Although the turbines were likely to cost less to build than nuclear plants or the cost of erecting a new coal-fired power station, it was still a bit more expensive than gas.
The site at Darling experienced about 3 000 average hours of wind a year, which meant the turbines would be more effective than many commercial turbines in Germany, which only had 2 000 average hours of wind a year.
However, the intention was to simply supplement the existing national power grid with electricity at peak and standard operating times, and not necessarily to replace base load capacity.
"Think of the electricity grid in South Africa as a lake. We will be one of the tributaries supplying into it, as will other sources of power," he said.
It had taken seven years to get the project to where it was and it had not been easy. There had been considerable research and development, financing had been difficult to obtain and there had been some resistance to the project, he said.
Some of the opposition to the project include the West Coast Nature Reserve, which complained about the visibility of the proposed turbines.
However, the UN authorities who declared the reserve a world biosphere site had noted that the wind turbines in the region were actually a positive factor in the reserve.
There had also been criticism from some that the turbines would kill birds.
However, experimental wind turbines operated by Eskom for more than a year had reported not a single death of a bird.