Hi, thanks so much for having me. My name is Mary Haw. I manage a team within the City of Cape Town’s Sustainable Energy Markets Department, called Sustainable Energy Facilitation. We do a broad range of energy-related projects, but a lot of it is around enabling customers to make better energy decisions in this changing energy landscape.
In the space that I work in, we look at the electric vehicle or e-mobility space and the new energy vehicle advent that’s coming our way, and I was really just sharing some of the diverse work that the City of Cape Town is doing. We really want to be an EV-friendly city. We want to support customers choosing alternative vehicle systems, both from a cost-saving and emissions reduction point of view.
From a national government point of view, we want to move away from relying on liquid fuels from other countries and be more resilient and reliant on our own energy sources. So I think the electric vehicle agenda and the new energy vehicle agenda is certainly something we in Cape Town want to support and it’s incredibly cross-cutting.
I think the role that we play is a lot around collaboration and getting inputs from different city departments, making sure they’re speaking to each other, engaging with external stakeholders, working with national and provincial governments; we’re just trying to make sure that we can facilitate and enable uptake both in the private sector but then also in our own fleets.
What I think is interesting there is that our own fleets department have got quite ambitious targets around transitioning to hybrids or EVs, and obviously the fleet is quite diverse, so, different vehicles for different uses and looking at different ownership models. I think as government, we’re probably quite conservative in how we procure vehicles, but we should look at leasing models or other ways of buying vehicles.
And then for me personally, I think the public transport sector is where a lot of the focus should be, at least for a municipality.
In our MyCiTi bus system, we’ve got a new phase coming online, and so anyone who’s in the Southern Suburbs knows about it, because it’s under construction now. But on that route, we have 30 buses that are being procured and a depot that’s being upgraded to be a big charging depot for those buses. So it’s really exciting but also really difficult, the interface between the buses themselves and the electricity grid: how you get enough energy there, how do you actually manage the charging, all of that. I think there’s a lot that we’re currently learning and a lot that we will learn when we start operating those buses.
They did, huge kudos to Golden Arrow. They have had their buses on the road for quite a few years now, they’re expanding their fleet, and they’re putting on solar PV on all of their depots to add green energy into their mix. So I think, they’ve done a really good job, and I think we can learn a lot from them.
I’ve been invited to their depot, so I’m interested to go and see their operations. I think one of the interesting elements that we will learn, and I’m sure they’re in the process of learning it, is around skills. Currently, if you think about bus management teams, they comprise bus drivers and mechanics and, you know, people in overalls.
But I think in the future when we have fleets full of electric buses, there are going to be people sitting behind computers, managing battery charging systems and that sort of thing. So I think, I think it is a skills shift that we should gear up for. Otherwise there are going to be people who can’t play in that new space.
So that’s a great question. I think across the country, the uptake’s still relatively low. The cost of the vehicles and the taxes associated with the import of the vehicles are still really high. So it’s been a slow start with EV uptake, and we don’t have a lot of models available to us, at least in the private car market. So it’s still quite a luxury item, a high-end vehicle.
What we are seeing though interestingly, is that there are sort of nodes of uptake. From an electricity grid point of view that’s an important thing to be aware of and an important element to manage, because the uptake of these cars is not dispersed across the city. So you might have a pocket of high income households and they all now have electric vehicles. And if all those vehicles plug in at the same time during the evening peak, that’s very difficult for our low voltage electrical network.
So as we see this change, I think from the electricity side, we need to optimise the fact that we’re selling more electricity, which is a good thing. But we also have to manage the fact that we might have demand challenges with nodes of high demand where vehicles are being charged. In other words, kind of relying on smart charging and having that interface with the charges to manage demand, incentivising better off peak charging through tariffs. I think there are mechanisms that we certainly are looking at on how we manage and optimise that charging behaviour.
Absolutely, and I think the minibus taxi industry plays an essential role in moving people around in Cape Town, particularly in the last sort of 5–10 years with the degradation of the rail system; we’ve seen a lot of people move onto the roads in many minibus taxis.
For me, that’s where we should focus our attention on transitioning to hybrid or electric vehicles, primarily for the cost saving element. I think for many low-income customers, they spend a huge portion of their income on transport, and if we can make that transport cheaper through alternative vehicle technologies such as electric vehicles, we can really help those customers save on transport costs.
So I think, there are a few elements to that. The one is the vehicles themselves. I know there’s some work in local assembly of an electric minibus taxi. I’m excited to see how that takes place and then how those get integrated into the taxi fleets. There obviously have to be financing options and working really closely with the taxi associations on how that works.
And then on the charging infrastructure side, an area of work that I think needs quite a lot of attention is how the municipality as owner of a lot of the transport interchanges can enable the charging infrastructure to be deployed at those interchanges. And again, it’s maybe not something that the city needs to own and operate themselves, and it’s possibly an opportunity for collaboration with private sector where the municipality and the private sector can work together on putting up charging infrastructure in key nodes of the taxi routes.
These things are phased and staged. So it’s really important to have these planning discussions with the taxi industry, for example, to understand which routes are likely to be electrified first; which nodes need charging now; are these taxis actually going to be spending the night somewhere else because that is where the charging infrastructure needs to be and not at the interchange. So I think it’s really important that these engagements happen early so that the longer term planning can happen.
We also did an interesting piece of work with Golden Arrow, MyCiTi and an organisation that works with the taxi industry to try and forecast long term where we see electrification happening first. Which nodes are likely to need more electricity? Basically it comes down to grid, and we learnt quickly that these discussions have to happen really early. And these are groups of people that in the past never really spoke to each other, for example, bus fleet managers and electricity planners.
And suddenly we realised, oh, hang on, that’s not a good spot to put an electric bus depot, because there’s no more electricity there, and it’s going to take a long time and a lot of money to provide the supply they need. So is it not better to have your charging site at another site?
These are the kinds of planning discussions that require very transversal sort of collaboration that in the past hasn’t happened, and it’s quite exciting to try and facilitate some of those discussions.
I think there’s quite a lot of discussion around the need for public charging infrastructure and we see it overseas where the uptake of electric vehicles is hampered by the fact that there aren’t enough chargers on the street, for example. But I think in South Africa, we have quite a unique situation and we must make sure that our approach is applicable to our situation, because maybe on-street charging is not what South Africa needs. I think a lot of the cars in South Africa spend the night in a garage or they’re actually going to be charged at an office parking lot or in a mall.
And so I think we need to be cognizant of the fact that what suits a London or an Amsterdam or a San Francisco might not be the same as what suits us. And so making sure that the model that we’re thinking of suits our driving habits and the types of vehicles that fit the city or that our customers will be owning and driving in.
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