Power and automation technology group ABB on Monday announced that it would construct two solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants for electricity utility Eskom, which would be completed by November.
The pilot plants, each of one hectare, would be located on greenfield sites adjacent to the Lethabo and Kendal coal-fired power stations and would be the first of their kind built in the country.
At the Kendal power station, in Mpumalanga, ABB would provide a fixed tilt solar PV power plant with a station capacity of 620 kW and production potential of 11.4-million kWh a year.
At the Lethabo site, in the Free State, the installation would comprise a single-axis tracking solar PV power plant with a peaking capacity of 575 kW and a production potential of 12.4-million kWh a year.
The PV plants would be designed to operate independently to produce electrical power for use by the existing power stations and would be capable of remote operation and monitoring.
“These orders will afford ABB in South Africa the opportunity for transfer of skills in solar technology which will complement and further enhance the local capabilities in engineering and project management,” said ABB South Africa country manager Carlos Pone.
The projects were being fast tracked for completion by November, prior to the seventeenth Conference of Parties on climate change to be held in Durban later in the year.
ABB said that it had a wide offering of products, systems and service solutions for the solar sector and has executed a number of turnkey PV projects around the world.
The company also recently invested in Novatec Solar, a leading provider of Linear Fresnel concentrated solar power technology, which uses flat mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy onto a receiver to produce steam.
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