Energy Partners’ Post

Transcript

But wherever I go, I hear the reports of what an amazing globally competitive business and leading business Atlantis Foundries is that he's putting Cape Town in South Africa on the map in, in the world's vehicle industry. So, so well done to to Atlantis Foundries and then to to the team that has worked on this energy project, Energy Partners, the installation contractors, the team from the City of Cape Town Energy Directorate, our economic growth Directorate. And others, whoever else has been involved, I see investors and and so on here. Well done to you. This is a remarkable path breaking project. And I'm glad that you're doing it in a city where we are really trying to facilitate this kind of investment. Obviously it would be easy for us to say, well, this is likely to to infect impact on the city's revenue and therefore we should make it as hard as possible. In fact, we take exactly the opposite approach in Cape Town, we saying for South Africa's future, for future energy security. For a growing economy, with that number one purpose in mind of getting our economy growing to get more people into work, we should be facilitating investments like this so we can build a future energy utility that is truly decentralized and democratized. So it is still the only city in the country so far as I know. This is certainly true last year, but but so far as now still the only city that has an active Wheeling program. And I don't know if you're going to have any spare capacity at better. But if you have spare capacity we would love to buy it from you and we will pay you for that. And we've made a commitment that the feed in tariff that we will pay will will be the same as the ESCOM tariff. We will not short change you in any way. We will we will buy it at the same price that we pay is come full of power. So we would love to do that and we'll it elsewhere in the city soon we will start a multilateral Wheeling program so that you don't have to just have one producer and one buyer you can have. Multiple producers or multiple buyers or in, in the same deal and and that will start later this year as well. And of course this is an enormous project, 13 megawatts. But we are doing the same even for homeowners where we allowing them to, to to sell power back to the city using the feeding tariff and that is becoming increasingly popular. We now have more than 900 customers in the city, residential customers selling them. Now that's still a small number, but as more and more people add to that number. You can buy more and more power from the from the residents and businesses of the city so that we can be load shedding secure in future and hopefully over time, bring down the price and make it more affordable and attractive to do business and invest in our city. So this project ticks all of those boxes, every one of those boxes. And thank you for playing that leadership role. I hope that you have felt a facilitative and enabling environment in your interactions with the city. And I hope that our city. Team has learned a huge amount from this first big project so that we can roll out, you know, and help other businesses to roll out many more of them in our city. Congratulations to you. I hope that it's achieved exactly what you wanted and I hope that you can buy a lot of the power back from you. Thanks a lot.