- Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, tabled a record R76,4 billion budget last week with a record R12,1bn Capital Expenditure budget – up by 75% from the Capex portion of their first budget two years ago.
- No other city in the country comes close to the scale of this infrastructure budget.
“Over the three years of this Medium-Term Revenue and Expenditure Framework, we will spend just under R40bn – R39,7bn to be precise – on capital projects, as part of our R120bn infrastructure portfolio of planned projects over 10 years,” said Hill-Lewis.
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“Our quest to end load-shedding over time remains a top priority of this administration, and we are still on track to meet our target of protecting our customers against the first 4 stages of load-shedding by 2026,” he added.
“Recently we reached a number of big energy milestones, which fills me with confidence for the rest of this mission. One of these milestones was the first window for applications by residential customers who want to sign up to get paid in cash for their excess rooftop solar power. Until now, that was only available to commercial customers, while residential households could get their municipal accounts credited. But we’ve just taken the first batch of applications for cash pay-outs, and we will soon open the second window,” said Hill-Lewis.
Hill-Lewis pointed out that in the latest budget, they have set aside R480m this year towards our 4-stages-of-load-shedding protection plan, which includes R82,4m for our Power Heroes demand management programme, R377m for the Steenbras Hydro power plant, and R31m in capital upgrades to that plant as we continue optimising its load-shedding protection potential.
Over the three-year MTREF period, the CIty will spend an estimated R722m on independent power purchases, including dispatchable energy to be deployed especially at peak times as part of the four-stages of protection plan.
Hill-Lewis said that the City will also invest heavily to make their service delivery load-shedding proof, with a budget of R680m over three years. This includes making municipal buildings more energy efficient, installing small-scale embedded generation at City facilities, developing our ground-mounted Solar PV plant at Atlantis, as well as various investments in generators, inverters, battery storage and UPS for hundreds of traffic signals.
“We will further be spending R4bn over the MTREF on upgrading and maintaining our city’s electrical grid – a critical part of our plans to become and remain energy secure,” said Hill-Lewis.
The to mayor’s full Budget Speech HERE
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
