JUWI Renewable Energies, leading global solar, wind, and hybrid project developer EPC and operations and maintenance (O&M) company, today announced that the 84 Megawatt (MW) Wolf Wind Project in the Eastern Cape has reached financial close.
The demand for large-scale renewables from both public and private has been off the charts, this has led to the rapid expansion of the clean energy leader’s footprint across the country, with over 1.5 GW of wind, 2 GW of solar, and 500 MW of hybrid projects incorporating storage in development for private and public energy users.
This Wolf Wind Project, located two hours from the city of Gqeberha, was successfully bid by Red Rocket in Round 5 of the South African government’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REI4P).
Richard Doyle, Managing Director, JUWI South Africa, while explaining said, “JUWI is committed to developing projects that help South Africa address the energy crisis and achieve the clean energy transition, and therefore the progress in rolling out REI4P projects is very encouraging. Concurrently, it is heartening to see the exponential growth in demand from the public and private sectors for large-scale renewable projects, and for hybrid projects that integrate battery storage. To support this demand, we plan to initiate the development of a further combined 1 GW of wind, solar and hybrid projects in 2023. Construction has started and the facility is projected to begin generating electricity for the South African grid by Q1 2024. It is the second wind project developed by JUWI to reach financial close under the REI4P – the first being the 138 MW Garob Wind Project that was successful in the previous REI4P bid round and which reached commercial operation in 2021.”
“As a South African company and an independent power producer, we’ve been investing in solutions to address the energy crisis for over ten years. We’re proud to have partnered with JUWI on this project and pleased to have started construction on this and other large wind projects,” said Matteo Brambilla, CEO, of Red Rocket.
“The Wolf Wind Project will be generating more than 360 GWh of clean electricity for the South African grid per year, offsetting 374,400 tonnes of CO2 each year and the project will bring over 200-million-rand community investment over 20 years through local social projects.”
“A key barrier to bringing large projects like Wolf online is grid capacity,” said Chris Bellingham, Head of Project Development, JUWI South Africa.
“Whilst we’re working on ways to overcome the challenges imposed on many of our projects by the Cape grid constraints, to meet the significant and growing demand for clean reliable power, we’re also actively developing a large portfolio of new and regionally diverse projects in unconstrained areas of the country’s grid.”
Recently, the energy regulator published an update on the lists of projects from private developers in the C and I sector where the number of projects registered by the regulator in South Africa in just the first two months of this year was already over 1000MW. This confirms that the demand for large solar, wind, and battery storage is growing nicely there.
This project is the second wind project developed by JUWI to reach financial close under the REI4P, the first was the 138MW Garob Wind Project which was successful in the previous REI4P bid round and which reached commercial operation in 2021.