On Friday morning, before President Cyril Ramaphosa announced SA’s R1.5-trillion just energy transition investment plan in the afternoon, I happened to be on a visit to Gold Fields’ South Deep mine. The deep level gold mine has an 80-year lifespan, which means it will be the last shaft standing in SA’s gold industry. It also has a new 50MW solar energy plant, the first self-built renewable energy plant of this scale in SA.
South Deep spent R715m on the plant, which can supply a quarter of its electricity; its panels occupy 200 football fields of land around the mine. Looking across the sea of panels to the mine shafts was a reminder that one day soon almost all of SA’s mines might look like that. Certainly, most of them plan to build their own renewable energy plants, if they haven’t started doing so already.
Peter Bruce is having a tough time,