Southern Hemisphere’s biggest Solar Plant opens in Pofadder
KaXu Solar One – a renewable energy power plant in the Northern Cape – has gone online after its grand opening outside Pofadder on Monday, March 2nd.
KaXu, which means “open skies” in the local Nama language, will use the sun to produce 100MW of energy for the National Grid, which is the equivalent of powering 80 000 households.
It is the first solar thermal electricity (STE) plant in South Africa, and is the largest of its kind not only in Africa, but the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Summertime temperatures in the Northern Cape soar to around 50 degrees Celsius, so it is an ideal location for solar power plants.
Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel said the R7,9 billion plant would go a long way in addressing South Africa’s energy crisis so that load shedding could be reduced.
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