In the first quarter of 2015, seven Vestas V112 wind turbines will be erected in the Great Kei local municipality at integrated renewable-energy company InnoWind’s 21 MW Chaba wind farm, in the Eastern Cape.

The Chaba wind farm project is one of the seven wind farm projects selected by the Department of Energy under bid window two of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) and will start operating commercially during the third quarter of 2015.

The project will provide State-owned power utility Eskom with much-needed electricity to increase its distribution network, which supplies local farmers and rural communities in the area.

The project is situated 600 m above sea level and it will generate enough power to supply 14 000 average households when producing at full capacity. This exceeds the power needs of the Great Kei municipality, which has a population of about 11 300 people.

“Despite the abundance of wind in this part of the Eastern Cape, which has access to the underused electricity grid and possesses sufficient roadworks, there is a lack of renewable developments,” says InnoWind CEO Martin Webb.

He adds that one of the reasons why the area has not seen many renewable-energy projects is the existence of historically strong community structures in the area. Land in the former homeland of the Transkei, historically, is communally owned under customary law.

However, InnoWind has managed to secure long-term land lease agreements with local communities, through the support of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, as well as the House of Traditional Leaders.

“We want to change the historical misperception that investment in this part of South Africa is not possible. We are one of the few developers to have invested significant time and money . . . in the former homelands despite the perceived development risks for private-sector investors such as ourselves,” Webb points out.

He adds that the current trend of overconcentration of renewable-energy projects in small pockets of the country creates an effective glut of long-term socioeconomic and enterprise development funding for select communities, whereas regions such as the former Transkei and Ciskei – which have significant wind and grid potential – do not play host to any wind projects, despite accounting for about 60% of the Eastern Cape’s population. Most of the population is rural and the province has the highest poverty levels in the country.

Therefore, construction of the Chaba wind farm on the edge of the former Transkei may finally signal a move by the renewable-energy sector away from the overdeveloped network hubs of the west of the country towards the vast and untapped, yet densely populated, regions of the rural hinterland, notes Webb.

Since 2009, InnoWind has been an advocate of decentralised medium-sized wind farms, spread throughout Eskom’s distribution network, and sized in accordance with Eskom’s existing connection infrastructure and capacity in order to decrease the overall burden placed on Eskom in terms of connection costs and connection delay risks.

“The Chaba wind farm is currently the only wind power project in the Eastern Cape to be connected directly to an existing Eskom distribution substation at the 22 kV level, which is the right way for projects to get easily connected in view of Eskom’s newly announced ten-year downward revision to its transmission infrastructure expansion plan owing to financial constraints,” says Webb.