Largest wind farms in South Africa — and how they stack up against the world’s biggest

South Africa’s biggest wind power plant comprises two sister facilities in the Northern Cape — Khobab and Loeriesfontein 2 — with a maximum generating capacity of just over 283MW.

Lekela Power constructed the two adjacent onshore wind farms as part of the third bid window of the Independent Power Producers (IPP) Procurement Programme.

They first entered commercial operation in December 2017, only two years after their operator was founded.

Both wind farms can generate around 563,500MWh of electricity every year, enough to support the energy needs of roughly 340,000 average South African households.

Each farm consists of 61 Siemens SWT-2.3-108 turbines spread over 6,653 hectares.

These stand 152 metres tall when measured from the ground to the tip of their blades at the highest point during a rotation.

When measuring their outputs individually — at 143.1MW for Khobab and 140MW for Loeriesfontein 2 — their capacity is on par with numerous other wind farms in South Africa.

These include the Oyster Bay, Roggeveld, Karusa, Soetwater, Longyuan Mulilo, and Nxuba wind farms. Several others also have capacities over 100MW.

But none of these farms come close to the world’s biggest wind power plants, several of which can generate well above 1,000MW at peak.

The world’s biggest wind farm has about 28 times the maximum generating capacity of the combined Khobab and Loeriesfontein 2 outputs.

The Gansu Wind Farm Project, also known as the Jiuquan Wind Power Base, consists of a large group of wind farms on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in China’s Gansu province.

The facility was initially planned to have a 20,000MW by 2020.

However, due to insufficient long-distance transmission capacity to take its generated electricity to major cities and the local government favouring coal power, it became one of China’s most underutilised wind plants.

As a result, the government halted construction after the plant reached 7,965MW of capacity.

It was built in multiple phases, with construction starting in 2009.

The first 3,800MW of capacity consisted of eighteen 200MW wind farms and two 100MW farms, while the second would have added another 8,000MW comprising forty 200MW farms.

By 2010, 5,160MW of capacity had already been installed, comprised of over 3,500 wind turbines. That increased to 6,000MW by 2012 and 7,965MW by 2015.

Wind power is considered a key contributor to South Africa’s future energy mix, according to the energy department’s integrated resource plan 2019 (IRP 2019).

This document envisioned that 17,742MW of wind power capacity would be installed by 2030, accounting for 22.53% of the energy mix.

It would be the most of any renewable energy source and over half the capacity of coal power expected to be connected to the grid by that time.

According to the plan, 4,942MW of wind power should have been online by the end of 2022.

But according to Eskom’s latest renewable statistics on its online data portal, only around 3,443MW of wind power capacity was connected to Eskom’s grid by 13 January 2023. That was barely around 400MW more than a year ago.

Meanwhile, the IRP 2019 expected 1,600MW of wind power to be added during 2022, while the additional capacity built between 2019 and 2021 was also lower than anticipated.

Delays in the signing off on IPP projects in multiple bid windows have led to spare grid capacity being taken up by private off-taker projects.

As a result, there is no more space for new wind power to be added to the transmission grid in the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, or Western Cape until 2027, barring significant and costly transmission upgrades.

These provinces have the ideal conditions and environments for the most efficient wind farms.

Some of this private generating capacity taken up by the off-takers could help reduce the demand on Eskom’s grid and the need for load-shedding. Still, there won’t be a direct and immediate benefit to the grid’s capacity.

The table below shows a snapshot of how much generating capacity of each energy type was planned to go online or decommissioned according to the IRP 2019.

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