MechChem Africa talks to Paul Nel, Energy leader for Zutari, who tells of the company’s renewable energy journey and shares his excitement at being back home to service the South and continental African markets.
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We have been exceptionally successful in building a renewable energy business within the engineering consultancy space, not only in South Africa but across the African continent,” begins Nel. “We have done projects all over all over Africa, in Ghana, Nigeria, Burundi Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar and many others.
“In South Africa, we have been involved in around 70% of all of the REIPPPP projects completed to date, starting from the very first bidding round some seven years ago. We understand the African and South African energy markets, so we are very strong and comfortable here,” he tells MechChem Africa.
“As a company, we were born and raised in Africa, so it feels good to have returned to our roots. Our collaboration with the global Aurecon Group enabled us to learn so much, but we have always been proudly African and I feel that it’s a real privilege to be involved in developing solutions for this continent,” he adds.
Nel says that, throughout its energy business, Zutari has world-class technical ability. “We have the ability to go deep when it comes to technical expertise. On the solar PV, side for example, a lot of companies will fulfil technical advisory or owners engineers roles in these projects. So can we, but in addition we can also offer the engineering design detail, so we can carry a project all the way from due diligences and feasibility, looking at the potential of an asset in terms of the capital investment required and, based on available energy forecasts, the expected electrical energy yields and financials returns,” he says.
Paul Nel believes that, on the African continent, Zutari is the best engineering house in the energy space, citing the company’s hydro abilities as evidence. “We believe we are the leading local hydro consultant in Africa. We are currently involved with a 40 MW hydro plant in Nigeria, two in Burundi and a further two smaller plants in the Northern Cape and Free State Provinces of South Africa. We are also assisting with a hydro refurbishment and engineering for a Greenfields project in Uganda, along with a large transaction in Tanzania that involves a combination of Hydro and wind.
“Hydro projects require an exceptional skills set and we can offer the hydro-mechanical, hydro-electrical and civil/structural aspects of these plants, large or small,”
he reveals.
“We really are a one stop shop,” he continues. “We do not simply do electrical plants, we can do roads, grid connection studies, detailed design, structural design and environmental impact studies,” he says.
“While with Aurecon, one of the things I really enjoyed was doing all the design work for the large Australian Solar PV plants out of our office in Cape Town. And even though we are now separated from the global group, we remain a key design resource for our Australian colleagues,” he says.
The energy mix of the future
With regard to the future, Nel believes the energy landscape is changing at rapid rate. “I am feeling positive about the reaction of the government and Eskom over past three years. Their narrative is much more pro renewables, which is very encouraging. We will have to live with load shedding for a while yet, which doesn’t mean that Eskom is not on the right path. It simply shows it’s a big ship that is inherently slow to turn around,” he suggests.
The current energy crisis, he believes, is driving positive change and our energy mix is going to look different and better in the future. Eskom has already announced its intention to decommission three of the older coal-fired power stations, Komatie, Grootvlei and Camden. “In terms of replacements, the answer has to be renewables, with a healthy dose of gas in the medium term to provide on-demand dispatchable power,” he says.
While renewables are not yet dispatchable, Nel says this is changing, with battery storage becoming far more available and affordable. Eskom itself is tendering for 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage for installation by December 2021. “Storage will make renewables dispatchable, and that is the point we have to get to. While the costs of battery storage are not yet comfortably viable, it can already be justified for many projects: when distance makes a grid connection too costly or when the grid stability is poor, for example,” he explains.
In a project in Madagascar, for example, Zutari is looking at a hybrid solution that combines solar PV with battery storage and HFO (heavy fuel oil) generators. “We expect to see more and more of these hybrid solutions on the African continent, driven by customers’ immediate needs,” he tells MechChem Africa.
Hybrid solutions, Nel argues, are interesting in that the sizes of the different components are constantly changing. As battery storage becomes more accessible with better energy density and efficiency, it can take on a larger and larger share of the power shortfall, allowing the HFO generation side to be decreased. Such systems are already being installed in a modular way so that PV generation and storage can be systematically expanded to minimise the use of the CO2-producing backup generator.
“These systems can also be installed close to where the power is needed. With coal, gas or hydro, the generation usually has to be close the fuel source, which makes the transmission losses much more significant. In South Africa, this is not a huge issue because we have a comprehensive distribution network, but in many countries in Africa, the infrastructure is weak so hybrid distributed solutions are likely to grow,” Nel predicts.
In South Africa, Zutari is increasingly dealing with larger mining resource companies, which are looking to pivot their business model into the energy space. Nel says Zutari is able to assist such companies to become direct suppliers of energy, via connections to a local or the national grid. “There is definitely a market for selling privately produced power through a transmission grid. These are mostly solar based, which is suited to most places in Southern Africa. Wind is trickier and mostly limited to coastal regions,” he says.
He predicts that solar energy will “definitely be” the energy of the future, for many reasons. It is the only energy resource that is off-planet; it is easy to install; few moving parts – none if not coupled to single or dual-axis tracking systems; it is stationary; and, compared to boilers and turbines, low temperature.
“Prices are going down and lots of research investment is going into efficiency improvements of solar panels and battery storage systems. 50 years from now, I believe solar could well be our dominant generation technology,” Nel says.
“For close to a decade now, we have been associated with some of the biggest renewable projects in Africa, and we are still involved in maintenance and advanced data analytics projects to optimise the performance of some of our first round REIPPPP projects.
“We have also begun to automate our PV design process, reducing the amount of repetitive design work by using computational techniques. Renewable technology is constantly being disrupted and we are part of that, which is very exciting.
“Greater energy availability will drive development and we expect to see the energy industry in Africa leap frog the prerequisite for large distribution and transmission networks. Instead, local and smaller distributed generation systems can be interlinked to form islanded solutions like the ‘cells’ of a cellular telephone network. This will create industry across Africa, I am sure of it.
“We at Zutari are passionate about who we are and what we do. We belong here. It is where we feel most comfortable and we are very proud to be part of driving the growth of our continent,” Nel concludes.
