While the energy crisis strangles businesses across the country, Lenasia’s Trade Route Mall has taken a monumental step towards solar power generation. The project will spare the popular mall from loadshedding, but the City of Johannesburg hopes it could meet the city’s growing energy demands in time to come.
Construction on the solar system project began at Trade Route Mall in 2020 in partnership with SolarAfrica Energy. The system went live on Wednesday, with members of the public and media present. Speaking at the launch event, centre manager Yaseen Valli said the mall was leading the way in green energy.
“We’d like to be an example and pioneer the way for shopping centres across South Africa [and] hopefully across the globe to do what we’ve done here,” said Valli, proudly adding that “there is no other system like this in a retail environment anywhere in South Africa.”
The solar power system comprising around 6 700 solar panels covers a vast area of 20 000 sqm to produce up to 2.6MW of power. The project cost nearly R56 million and created more than 100 jobs in the process. To put that into perspective, 1MW can supply around 164 households.
Valli said Trade Route Mall acknowledged the strain on the country’s power grid. He said this was an attempt to fulfil “our green responsibility and our social responsibility in relieving the grid of power”.
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City of Johannesburg
Meanwhile, City of Johannesburg Mayor Dr Mpho Phalatse, dressed in a blue overall, hailed the investment as a positive development. She said the city would be keen to purchase power from Trade Route Mall in the near future.
“Effectively, the mall is getting off the grid. The City wants to enter into partnerships with independent power producers so that, with this addition, we don’t find ourselves in a position where we’re no longer selling electricity and this is important because we rely so much on revenue generated from the sale of electricity, water and various other taxes.”
Phalatse stressed the need for partnerships with independent power producers (IPPs) as she said addressing the city’s energy inadequacy was one of the priorities of the multiparty coalition government.
She added that Johannesburg – the economic hub of South Africa – needed to maintain economic activity “around the clock” to ensure that it could compete with other cities on the African continent.
“It [loadshedding] works against us claiming our place as the economic hub of the country and of the continent. We’re always competing with Cairo as well as Lagos. We’re always in the top three and we need to get back to the number one slot but we can’t if we’ve got things like loadshedding.”
Phalatse said a rapidly increasing population in the city of six million, coupled with deterioration of infrastructure, was the reason why the city was grappling with energy demand.
“When the government does eventually announce that we can wield power, we’ll obviously sell power into the grid to relieve pressure off the grid,” said Valli.
