The South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI) is celebrating a decade of commitment to development, innovation, efficiency and sustainability in energy consumption. In light of this milestone, SANEDI has reflected on the ten unique ways that the organisation’s work has excelled at its mandate through multiple groundbreaking initiatives. SANEDI was founded ten years ago on 19 July.

“SANEDI launched at a time when many of the proposed solutions and innovative ideas to enhance sustainable development, energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions were in an infancy stage in emerging economies. Today we have made notable strides in planning and testing solutions to develop South Africa’s future energy systems while transforming how we consume energy from household to industry level,” said interim CEO Lethabo Manamela.

1). The 12L tax incentive offers tax reductions for energy efficiency in a bid to transform the way South Africa consumes energy by incentivising the uptake of efficiency technologies across all industries. It is an opportunity for businesses to increase profits through reduced energy costs and encourage capital expenditure in energy efficiency. By doing this we can significantly reduce our carbon footprint and take demand off the national grid. SANEDI is an implementing agent of the incentive certification process which is boosting diverse human resource capacity in the energy efficiency assessment space.

2). It is common knowledge that South Africa has bountiful wind resource capacity. Through the Wind Atlas of South Africa programme we now have a quantitative assessment of the country’s wind capability that will serve as a blueprint in the planning of large scale wind power. It includes dedicated wind resource assessment and siting tools for planning purposes that can be used for feasibility studies in support of projects; as well as a high resolution wind resource map launched in 2019. The atlas is freely available.

3). Over 420 solar thermal demonstration projects have been built and 3000+ persons have been trained through the SOLTRAIN collaborative project –saving 3000 megawatt hours of electricity and avoiding over 500 tons of CO2 emissions since 2009. 4) SANEDI places exceptionally strong emphasis on gender equality in its corporate strategy. To this end women have benefitted from SANEDI’s bursaries for human capacity building in theenergy sector. (2010 to 2020). We continue to support and partner with various empowerment
initiatives across the sector.