Frank Spencer is a well-known renewable energy personality in the South African renewable energy space. He currently heads up Cainmani’s South Africa business, where he leads the development of greenfield utility-scale renewable power projects for private sector offtake. Frank is a member of the AGES advisory board and a spokesperson for the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association (SAPVIA).
Let’s start with some background about you and the company you are with.
I’m Frank Spencer, I head up the local activities for Cainmani, a Spain-headquartered renewables project development house, although the majority of our project development activities are happening in South Africa. We develop wind and solar utility-scale projects from the ground up, and we have an emerging GW class of projects.
My background: I am an engineer, I worked on some of the very earliest rooftop solar projects in the early 2000s, and that led me down a path of having worked across South Africa and Africa on renewable projects and now working on very large projects.
What are some of the exciting projects that you are working on right now?
I think we’ve just come out a period of intense loadshedding, which has perhaps been quite a big negative in people’s lives. What I think is super exciting about the South African energy landscape is that we are going through a transition from dirty fossil fuel-based electricity to clean electricity. The problem with the fossil fuel electricity is that even around the coal mines and the coal power stations there are excessive health risks, deaths and environmental pollution, not to mention the effects on climate change, which are also massively exacerbated by our historical fossil fuel dependency.
So although loadshedding has been quite a challenge for everyone, and particularly the poor, it has led to a rapid adoption of renewables at all scales. We certainly need this transition to clean electricity, both because it is now the lowest cost form of electricity, so it will help to keep pricing down, but also on the global stage, where export products need to become carbon neutral or at least have significantly reduced carbon as part of it, with the introduction of things like CBAM from Europe, this massive scaling up of solar and wind is happening just in time.
What are the main challenges in your opinion?
The challenges tend to change. I’ve often described this sector as playing a football game where they keep moving the goal posts, changing the size of the field, changing the size of the ball, the number of balls and the number of players.
So I think that today the challenges could be different from tomorrow. Perhaps one of the major challenges today is grid access: it’s not easy to get good access through Eskom, or it’s harder than it was, and the opportunities to or where there is still grid available are reducing.
And so, within the short term, we will probably take up all of the available capacity for new projects, which means we need new infrastructure on the grid side to be deployed, but mostly in terms of transmission. We’re also only just starting to roll the ball on that side. Fundamentally, we need transmission carved out of Eskom—the national transmission company is happening and is imminent—and then to bring funds into that entity, whether it’s public or private, to roll out this infrastructure.
That’s probably one of the major challenges that is approaching really fast right now.
Do you think there should be more collaboration regionally to solve these issues?
I think regional cooperation is important and certainly having more enablement through entities like the Southern African Power Pool to help provide balancing services, and trading throughout the region can certainly help.
But I think the major challenges in the rest of the region often also relate to policy, political and regulatory issues that just make it really hard to bring a project online. And so we typically see when we compare project development in South Africa to project development elsewhere on the continent that it can cost four times as much and take eight times as long. And you’re not even getting the return that you would normally get from a project here. And that’s from all the regional challenges.
So, I think that does require political will to change the framework, and that would then change all of that cost paradigm as well.
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