Sun City, the world-famous hotel, casino and entertainment resort, is planning a huge solar farm that could generate enough electricity to not only take itself off the Eskom grid, but light up surrounding villages..
With the farm still in planning stages, the resort is installing 2,548 solar panels on the roof of its entertainment centre to mitigate the effects of higher stages of load-shedding.
Lwazi Mswelanto, sustainability manager at Sun City, said 60% of the panels have been installed. The rest will be in by the end of July, enabling the resort to generate 1.4MW of renewable energy, covering 14% of its needs at peak times.
“That’s equivalent to about 329 households in South Africa. It’s looking to generate 2,300KW hours a year on completion.”
Monthly power usage averages between 7MW and 9MW, but when hosting big events such as the Nedbank Golf Challenge, it gets ramped up to a maximum of 14MW.
Mswelanto said the R16m rooftop solar project was an immediate renewable energy intervention but the bigger plan is to create a mega solar farm that will not only take the resort completely off reliance on Eskom, but could produce enough excess energy to feed back to the grid.
“We are running this as a pilot project because there is potential for a bigger solar farm within the Sun City area due to how much sun we get and how hot it becomes.”
If it’s allowed, we'll go as big as we can. We’ve got vast space available. It would benefit not just us but the surrounding communities as well
— Lwazi Mswelanto
Under a special arrangement with Eskom, the resort does not get load-shed but is regularly asked to reduce its power usage depending on the stage of load-shedding being implemented.
At stage two, for example, Eskom will request a 10% load reduction. To keep the lights on in the hotels, casino, entertainment and other areas, 13 diesel backup generators are powered up.
“Because we cannot keep the resort in the dark, whenever we go to load reduction we supplement that lost energy through our generators, but that costs us money. To generate electricity using diesel is about seven times more expensive than power received from Eskom,” Mswelanto said.
With high load-shedding, the generators run up to 24 hours a day, he added.
That is why management is conceptualising a mega solar farm that can take care of the resort’s needs and those of surrounding communities, if regulations allow it.
Mswelanto said they were still working out the size of the envisaged farm, the amount of energy it will be able to provide, the cost of the project and how excess power will be distributed. He said determining its full energy capacity would be dependent on Eskom permitting Sun City to feed excess energy back to its grid.
“If that is not allowed, we’ll go smaller just for the resort. But if it’s allowed, we'll go as big as we can. We’ve got vast space available. It would benefit not just us but the surrounding communities as well.”
The government is setting up a separate transmission company to allow independent power producers and large self-generators to sell power directly to residential and commercial users.
An amendment to the Electricity Regulation Act is for the first time making it possible for self-generated energy to be wheeled to municipal and other customers on existing transmission lines.
Meanwhile, work to expand its popular Vacation Club has seen Sun City employ 20 local construction companies. In October, ground was broken on the R295m Lefika Villas, adding to the holiday club portfolio Sun Vacation Club, which also houses The Reserve.
It was opened in 1996 and boasts 234 units targeting the entry-level market. There is also The Aviary, launched in 2004, which has 148 units for mid-level customers.
Mswelanto said the resort — whose feeder area comprises 107 villages in the Moses Kotane municipality — was taking in 100 unemployed young people a year for training and upskilling in its learnership programme.
The students don’t work only at Sun City, but throughout the hospitality industry. “If we train them in food and beverage, they can work anywhere in South Africa,” he added.
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