A Free State commercial farming operation Belle Rive, spanning more than 2 000 ha, has appointed solar energy company RenEnergy Africa as its engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor to design and deliver what will become one of South Africa’s largest offgrid agricultural solar-plus-storage systems.

The installation – a ground-mounted 4.89 MW solar PV array paired with a 20 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) – is under construction. Once complete, the system will distribute power across the farming site through about 17 km of medium-voltage (MV) reticulation.

RenEnergy says the 20 MWh BESS at Belle Rive is, based on available market data and supplier intelligence, the largest privately contracted, purpose-built BESS deployed in service of an offgrid agricultural operation in South Africa.

The company has referred to nonprofit organisation GreenCape’s 2025 Market Intelligence Report, which highlights that the entire behind-the-meter storage market for the commercial, industrial and agricultural (CI&A) sectors in South Africa is expected to stabilise at about 400 MWh/y of new installations.

RenEnergy says a single privately contracted agricultural installation of 20 MWh therefore represents 5% of yearly national CI&A storage deployment.

The over 2 000 ha scale of the farm’s operational footprint is central to the engineering challenge, and RenEnergy highlights that distributing reliable, uninterrupted power across that distance to irrigation systems, cold rooms, packhouses, and processing infrastructure running on a diverse multi-crop production calendar requires a fundamentally different system architecture to a compact commercial and industrial (C&I) or logistics installation.

The company further points out that the Belle Rive energy system was designed to deliver energy continuity at agricultural scale, across distances and load variability that commercial farming demands.

Further, the Belle Rive farm operates across seed potatoes, ware potatoes, pecan nuts, onions and maize, which is viewed as a production base with hard dependencies on energy continuity throughout seasonal cycles.

RenEnergy also notes that irrigation systems, cold storage and processing infrastructure run continuously during peak production periods and seasonal windows leave no margin for power interruptions.

This investment, the company explains, was driven by compounding grid cost exposure as State-owned power utility Eskom tariffs for direct customers increased by 12.74% in April 2025, following increases of 18.65% in 2023 and 12.72% in 2024, with a further 8.76% increase effective April 1 this year.

RenEnergy notes that electricity contributes about 6% to total agricultural production input costs nationally – a figure that rises materially for operations with significant cold chain and irrigation load.

“We had reached a point where the question wasn’t whether to invest in energy independence, but how quickly we could make it happen. Our operations run across a large area of farmland – there’s no room for power interruptions when you’re managing cold storage and irrigation at this scale. This installation gives us the certainty to plan and operate without that exposure,” says Belle Rive Farm owner Stanley de Beer.

At Belle Rive, the scale and complexity of the farming operation made this especially critical, as the RenEnergy engineering team conducted half-hourly consumption analysis across multiple supply points, profiled load behaviour across seasonal agricultural cycles, and assessed major farm equipment before arriving at the final system configuration.

The company says the 20 MWh BESS sizing reflects the farm’s requirement to sustain critical loads through the night and across extended overcast periods, without fallback to diesel or the Eskom grid.

“Delivering a 20 MWh offgrid system across more than 2 000 ha of active farmland is not a standard brief. Commercial agriculture has a fundamentally different demand profile to logistics or manufacturing – it is seasonal, operationally critical, and unforgiving of interruptions.

“What makes Belle Rive significant is not just the scale of the BESS, but what that scale has to do: keep cold chain, irrigation, and processing running continuously, across a farm of its size. This is what genuine energy independence looks like for South African agriculture,” says RenEnergy business development head Juandré Pitout.

He concludes that Belle Rive Farm’s decision to go fully offgrid reflects a pattern now emerging across South Africa’s larger commercial farming operations, highlighting that energy is no longer an operating cost to be managed incrementally, but a capital investment with a defined return, a long asset life, and a direct bearing on competitive viability.