Swiss power and technology group ABB has announced it is to construct two solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants for Eskom, South Africa’s national electricity provider.
The two one-hectare pilot plants will be located on greenfield sites adjacent to the coal-fired power stations at Lethabo in the Free State, and Kendal in Mpumalanga. They will be the first of their kind to be built in South Africa.
The PV plants will be designed to operate independently to produce electrical power for use by the existing power stations and will be capable of remote operation and monitoring. The fast-track projects are scheduled to be completed by November 2011.
At the Kendal power station, ABB will provide a fixed tilt solar PV power plant with a station capacity of 620 kilowatts and production potential of 11,445,398 kilowatt hours per year. At the Lethabo site, the installation will comprise a single-axis tracking solar PV power plant with a peaking capacity of 575 kilowatts and a production potential of 12,491,479 kilowatt hours per year.
Commenting, Franz Josef Mengede, head of Power Generation at ABB, said: “ABB technologies are playing a key role in facilitating the generation and grid integration of renewable energies. Solar power has an important role to play in our future energy mix and we are pleased to support Eskom in this pioneering effort.”
ABB has extensive experience within the solar sector, having already executed a number of turnkey PV projects around the world. The company also recently invested in Novatec Solar, a provider of linear Fresnel concentrated solar power (CSP) technology, which uses flat mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy onto a receiver to produce steam.
Headquartered in Zurich, ABB operates in around 100 countries and employs about 130,000 people.
