Welcome to Lego land, Africa’s biggest solar farm in De Aar

Cape Town – An Irishman’s passion for job creation and solving South Africa’s energy restrictions with green technology resulted in the development of the largest solar farm in Africa. It launches this month.

Phelan Energy Group’s Pascal Phelan told Fin24 how he decided to transform his game farm near Kimberley into a solar farm to generate 175MW electricity. It will light up 175 000 households.

“I call the solar photovoltaic business Lego land,” he said. “If you can work out how to make a megawatt, you simply plug another set of metawatts together and the sky is the limit in terms of volume.”

Phelan has invested R4bn into the project near the small town of De Aar in the Northern Cape, creating 2 000 jobs during the construction phase and 50 full time employees to run the solar farm.

Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson singled out the project in her debate on the state of the nation this year, where she will open it officially on 17 March in De Aar.

This forms part of her successful independent power producers programme, which has seen R194bn invested in South Africa.

“The big, old electrical utilities have all failed at it (keeping up with energy sector) because they’re not nimble enough,” said Phelan. “It’s an entrepreneurs business and you have to be quick and fast on your feet, focus on low costs, focus on efficiency and don’t spend so much time thinking about it.

This article was published here