As my EskomSePush app has reminded me multiple times in the past couple of days, our electricity grid is about as reliable and robust as a Cricket South Africa inquiry. Clearly, companies need to build alternatives wherever possible. With resource prices doing well, mining companies simply cannot afford to be dealing with outages and inflationary pressures linked to electricity powered by fossil fuels.

Luckily, there’s a bright alternative – as bright as the sun itself!

Pan African Resources has successfully commissioned the first solar photovoltaic (PV) plant of 10MW capacity in the local mining industry. The project is found at Evander Gold Mines and will power 30% of the power requirement at the surface retreatment operations. With a cost of R150 million and a saving of R3 million every month at current tariffs, payback is expected in just over 4 years (and probably less based on inflation).

This also reduces group emissions by 5%, so there are ESG points on offer here.

There’s more to come. A feasibility study to expand this plant to 12MW to power Evander underground organic growth projects has nearly been completed and construction is expected to start in FY23. Next year should also see an additional 8MW PV plant constructed at Barberton Mines.

So, by 2024, there should be 30MW of capacity in operation across the group.

This project created 202 temporary local jobs and was implemented by juwi Renewable Energies South Africa, a subsidiary of German-headquartered juwi Group. You can tell this is a techy company because they don’t believe in capital letters.

It’s terrific to see this kind of investment in South Africa!