Energy5.03.2024

Biggest solar farm in South Africa vs the World

South Africa’s largest solar farm by capacity has only about 6.4% of the maximum potential output of the world’s biggest solar plant.

Even though South Africa has an abundance of sunshine, Eskom does not have any utility-scale solar installations.

Instead, all solar farms are operated by Independent Power Producers, who sell their electricity to Eskom as part of power-purchasing agreements.

The country has two main types of large solar plants — photovoltaic (PV) farms and concentrated solar plants (CSPs).

In simple terms, PV panels absorb the sun’s light energy to cause movements in electrons that generate electrical current.

CSP have numerous panels placed in a circle to direct heat energy from the sun to a central container with molten salt, which can boil water to generate steam and turn a turbine.

CSPs offer energy storage as an additional benefit but are substantially more expensive to build.

The largest solar farm providing electricity to South Africa’s grid as of March 2024 is Solar Capital’s De Aar Project in the Northern Cape.

Solar Capital’s De Aar Solar Farm

The PV facility has an installed generating capacity of 175MW, enough to provide electricity to roughly 75,000 homes annually.

It has over half a million PV modules spread across 4.73km2.

Construction of the project was divided into two phases.

The first was completed in August 2014 and provided 85.26MW of capacity, while the second phase expanded capacity by a further 90MW about two years later.

The entire project took 28 months and cost R4.8 billion, working out to R27.4 million per megawatt of capacity.

While it is substantially larger than other solar farms in South Africa, it pales in comparison to the world’s largest facilities.

Solar Capital De Aar Solar Farm

The biggest solar farm currently in operation is India’s Bhadla Solar Park.

It provides around 2,245MW of consistent power during the day, with recent upgrades reportedly bumping its peak installed capacity to 2,700MW.

Located in the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, the farm consists of over 100 million flat PV panels covering a 56km2 area.

Its capacity is sufficient to provide electricity to 1.3 million homes.

Bhadla Solar Park was built in four phases, starting in 2015 and ending in 2020, with funding of about $2.175 billion (R41.24 billion).

At the peak of construction, over 10,000 direct and indirect jobs were supported by the project.

The Bhadla facility can produce more power during the day than South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power station and around half of what is supposed to be the peak capacity of the troubled Medupi and Kusile plants, Eskom’s newest coal power stations.

Bhadla Solar Park. (2024, February 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

The other largest solar farms in the world are as follows:

  • Huanghe Hydropower’s Hainan Solar Park/Golmud Solar Park in China — 2,200MW
  • Pavagada Solar Park in India — 2,050MW
  • Benban Solar Park in Egypt —1,650MW
  • Tengger Desert Solar Park in China — 1,547MW

Although Bhadla cannot provide power on-demand at night, it is noteworthy that its per-MW capacity cost is substantially lower than Eskom’s newest power stations.

With Kusile’s total estimated cost expected to balloon to R161.4 billion by the end of construction, a single megawatt of capacity capability at the power station will have carried a cost of R33.63 million.

Every megawatt of capacity of the Bhadla Solar Park cost around R18.37 million to build.

In addition to running on clean energy, operating costs are much lower than at stations like Medupi and Kusile, which require coal to run.

If the Rajasthan government wanted to install backup batteries to provide 12 hours of power during the evenings with 2,245MW of supply, it would have to buy 26,940MWh in storage.

With lithium-ion battery prices at around $110 per kWh in November 2023, such an installation could cost roughly $2.9 billion, or about R55.13 billion. 

This does not factor in the cost of the equipment needed to output power at the same level as the plant’s capacity.

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