We can’t say that we don’t need this right about now. A company called SolarReserve announced recently that a new solar power plant near Kimberly, called the Jasper plant, is online and set to power up to 80,000 homes in South Africa every year. Why is this appearing on Stuff? Solar power, obviously, but the initiative was also made possible with the involvement of Google, who seems to be everywhere these days.
Jasper joins the Lesedi solar power plant, which is located right next door. The Jasper setup uses over 325,000 photovoltaic cells to make up its 96mW capacity. There’s more coming to boot, in the form of the 100mW Redstone concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) tower which SolarReserve is hoping to be involved in as well.
Jasper is the largest solar power plant on the African continent and is able to generate 180,000 megawatt-hours of power a year. SolarReserve finished the project two months early, Jasper was only supposed to come online in 2015. Sadly it seems that this won’t assist a whole lot with Eskom’s recent activities, if the current wave of load-shedding is any indication.
Source: The South African
