South Africa: Sungrow enters talks to supply 612MWh tender-winning battery project

The term sheet covers BESS supply and a 15-year long-term operations & maintenance (O&M) service contract for the project. Sungrow would supply its PowerTitan 2.0 liquid-cooled lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery storage units.

Red Sands was one of five project bids selected by the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) of South Africa in the first window of the DMRE’s Battery Energy Storage IPP Procurement Programme (BESIPPPP).

The programme seeks to establish an installed base of battery storage assets to benefit the grid operated by national utility Eskom. So far, three windows of the BESIPPPP have been held to award 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) type contracts with Eskom.

Its competitive solicitations followed tenders for variable renewable energy generation through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) and firm and dispatchable renewable energy capacity through the Risk Mitigation IPP Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP).

Red Sands will be on a 5-hectare site in South Africa’s Northern Cape region, connecting to the grid via Eskom’s Garona substation. Globeleq hopes to close financing for it this year, to bring Red Sands into commercial operation in 2027.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in April 2024 when the contract award for Globeleq’s Red Sands was announced, the project was originated by developer Africa Green Ventures (AGV).

Globeleq is majority-owned by the UK government’s development finance institution British International Investment (BII), which holds a 70% stake in the IPP, and its Norwegian counterpart, Norfund. Focused on Africa, earlier projects under its original ownership by investor Actis centred around thermal power generation but as of the time of Actis’ exit in 2015, it was developing and the owner primarily of solar PV and wind assets in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In January this year, trade association AFSIA Solar said there had been a boom in energy storage development in Africa in recent years, from just 31MWh of cumulative installations as of 2017 to 1,600MWh by the end of 2024.

That said, the majority of storage project capacity counted by AFSIA Solar in its Solar Africa Solar Outlook 2025 already deployed or in development or construction was paired with renewable generation, with standalone BESS projects like Red Sands less common.

The first window for BESIPPP in South Africa awarded contracts to a total 513MW/2,052MWh of BESS projects, the second awarded 615MW/2,460MWh across eight projects.

The third window targeted the same amount as the second, with the 33 bidders revealed in November 2024 currently awaiting the government’s selection. Globeleq was among the participants in Window 3, bidding for 123MW of contracted capacity, while French energy major TotalEnergies submitted four bids.