Asian giants among 118 bidders for solar plant tender
Mbongeni Mguni | Tuesday September 1, 2015 15:44
The Ministry of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources recently floated a request for Expressions of Interest for the independent supply of two scalable 50MW solar plants to power the northwestern copper belt and Jwaneng Mine.
Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Board (PPADB) public relations and education manager, Ditapole Chibua-Tsheboeng confirmed the line up of suitors for the project, whose tender closed last week.
“The next step would be to handover the Expressions of Interest to the producing entity (MMEWR) to evaluate the bids,” she said.
The list of bidders includes Toyota subsidiary, Toyota Tsusho, which reported revenues of US$71.9 billion (approx P72 billion) in 2012 and employs 33, 845 people across its operations. Another Japanese firm in the running, Marubeni Corporation employs 39,126 people and enjoyed revenues of about P1 billion in 2013. Saudi Arabia’s, ACWA Power, whose investors include state-owned entities in the oil kingdom, is also among bidders. ACWA Power reported revenues of P17.9 billion in 2013 and boasts 500MW of both coal and solar power projects in South Africa.
South African bidders for the tender include South Africa Clean Energy, Abengoa Solar Power SA, Solaire Direct SA and Vusa African Energy. Cennergi, the 50/50 joint venture between Exxaro and Tata Power has also submitted an Expression of Interest.
Another bidder is Magnum Gas and Power, the Australian energy developer, which listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange last December. Local firms in the race include Kalahari Solar, Our Sun Energy, WBHO Construction and several consortiums.
According to the original request for Expressions of Interest, the winning bidders will be required to “to build, operate, maintain and decommission the power plants at the end of their economic lives”. Government also wants the plants to be capable of being expanded.
The solar tender comes at a time when the country emerges from grinding winter electricity shortages caused by technical faults at the 600MW Morupule B plant and limited imports from the equally squeezed southern African power pool.