A $104m Solar Plant Is Being Built To Tackle South Africa's Power Issues

Africa's largest data center company secures $104 million from Absa Group Ltd. to construct a 120MW solar plant and 80MW wind farm in South Africa's Free State province.

Teraco Data Environments Ltd., the largest data centre company in Africa, is embarking on a groundbreaking renewable energy initiative in South Africa.

The data company has secured an initial funding of 2 billion rand ($104 million) from Absa Group Ltd. and is set to construct a 120-megawatt solar plant and an 80-megawatt wind farm in South Africa’s Free State province.

Teraco’s CEO, Jan Hnizdo, outlined the company’s ambitious goal, stating, “The plan is to get all of our power from renewable energy sources by 2035.” South Africa grapples with daily power outages, with homes and businesses experiencing more than 10 hours without electricity. In response to this challenge, companies, including Teraco, are investing in their own generation facilities. “Over the past two years, our uptime has been 100%, but grid availability has been around 15% and at some sites at about 20%. So we needed to supplement that with diesel, and it’s a huge cost. I can tell you it costs millions of rands in a month. It’s a huge cost to us,” he told IT Web.

The solar plant is expected to provide eight hours of daily power supply, acting as a supplement to power from Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. Teraco anticipates a reduction in the state-owned power utility’s coal dependency from 85% to 60% over the next three years, thanks to the increasing presence of independent power producers, BNN Bloomberg reports.

The negotiations to secure agreements with the South African government and Eskom to connect to the grid spanned approximately three years. Teraco’s renewable energy facilities are slated to come online within the next three years, signalling a transformative step towards sustainable and resilient power solutions in South Africa.

These facilities are expected to not only power Teraco’s data operations but also address the challenges posed by frequent blackouts in the SADC nation.