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Northern Cape town Orania is supplying nearly half of its electricity demand with its own solar power generation and battery storage.
Riaan Jacobs, the head of Orania’s electricity utility, Orasol, told MyBroadband that the town has almost 1.4 megawatt (MW) of ground-mounted solar panel capacity.
Commercial properties and homes add at least another 600kW of rooftop solar generation, although this number is likely to be higher, Jacobs said.
Orania’s residents and businesses can also benefit from a feed-in tariff of R1.92 for their excess electricity — among the best rates in the country.
These tariffs can be used as a credit towards any electricity-related charges, including fixed fees.
Orania has also invested heavily into avoiding load-shedding.
One of the most recent upgrades to Orania’s electricity supply is a 4.8 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery energy storage system (BESS), which became fully operational in August 2024.
With 4.3MWh of useable capacity, the BESS alone can supply the town’s peak demand of roughly 1.9MW for at least two hours when there is no solar supply.
The BESS can carry Orania’s average demand of roughly 1.2MW for over three and a half hours.
The BESS supported Orania’s full electricity demand during the past weekend’s bout of stage 3 load-shedding.
Jacobs said that Orania’s total self-generating capacity could support around 45% of the town’s total electricity demand.
That was substantially higher than the 30% of demand their solar power generation could supply before installing the BESS.
Jacobs said the town was proud of its self-generating expansion, and even though the initial costs were high, the investment was worth it.
He explained that the town could shield residents and businesses without backup batteries from load-shedding and other Eskom-related power issues and conduct energy arbitrage.
Arbitrage sees the utility buying cheaper electricity from the grid during off-peak hours and relying more on its own generation and storage during peak demand periods when electricity is expensive.
A typical example would be to use as much of the BESS’s capacity during the evening peak demand period before switching over to the grid.
That means although Orania has taken over 45% of its electricity demand from Eskom, it is saving more than 45%.
These savings would be in addition to reducing the economic impact of power outages.
Good relationship with Eskom
Jacobs said that Orasol maintained a good relationship with Eskom, including securing agreeable terms for selling back its excess electricity and an exemption from load-shedding.
Under the deal, Orasol is allowed to completely exempt the town from load-shedding, as long as it does not draw any Eskom power during a scheduled outage.
This is different from what occurred in Frankfort, whose electricity supplier Rural Free State (RFS) ran into trouble with Eskom for exempting its customers in Frankfort from load-shedding.
RFS argued that its 3.7MWp solar farm had enough capacity to generate electricity for the town’s total demand.
However, Eskom said this capacity was not dispatchable and that the solar power plant formed part of the town’s normal load profile.
RFS and Eskom eventually came to an agreement that no load-shedding was necessary if the distributor did not draw from the grid during scheduled power outages, similar to Orania.
However, RFS cannot supply the town’s peak demand during load-shedding itself, so only those customers who participate in a voluntary load curtailment programme can sidestep the power cuts.
The big difference is that Orasol can meet Orania’s peak demand at any time of the day — including at night when the sun is not shining — through strategic charging and discharging of its BESS.
Jacobs told MyBroadband that Orania planned to increase its electricity self-reliance further to reduce electricity costs in the long run.
Jacobs said the town was aiming to bump its 45% grid usage reduction to 65% in the short to medium term.
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