SolarPACES interviewed Bernard Geldenhuys, the Senior Transactor in the Power and Infrastructure team at Investec Bank, a lender with 8,300 employees

How a Bank Resurrected SolarReserve’s Redstone CSP with ACWA Power

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2021-06-07 12:00:09

SolarPACES interviewed Bernard Geldenhuys, the Senior Transactor in the Power and Infrastructure team at Investec Bank, a lender with 8,300 employees that has been closely involved in the 100 MW Redstone solar power tower since 2018, when its delayed PPA was signed with Eskom, as the first commercial bank to support the transaction, providing senior debt worth R750m and foreign exchange and interest rate hedging. Redstone is now financed at R11.5bn (about $837 million USD) and is finally about to break ground, with completion planned by the end of 2023. Eskom had put it on hold in 2016 along with other renewable PPAs. Thanks to the benefits of scale and ongoing reductions in CSP components, Investec claims that Redstone will have the “lowest tariff” of South Africa’s Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants but did not reveal the price of the 20-year PPA with Eskom.

Q: How were you able to get the Redstone tower CSP back on track? A: Redstone is important for the South African economy. Eskom urgently requires approximately 6,000 MW of base load power over the next five years. This is being partly addressed by the 2,000 MW RMIPPP Programme. ACWA Power Redstone, with its 33-month construction period, 12 hours of thermal energy storage and 35-year useful life, is capable of providing fully dispatchable baseload electricity to the grid in support of these requirements. It’s the first Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement (REIPPP) project to provide ancillary services such as grid stabilisation, to Eskom, at no additional cost.