Cape Town - Load shedding’s impact on the local tourism industry was highlighted by Cape Town Tourism (CTT), GreenCape and the City at an event last week where plans were laid out to help tourism operators combat the effects of the energy crisis, while load shedding remains a challenge in attracting tourists.
CTT CEO Enver Duminy said: “There’s no doubt that the sustained and erratic outages have made it close to impossible for our local tourism businesses to plan for disruption, which has taken a dramatic toll.
Furthermore, we’re concerned that load shedding will make prospective visitors less likely to make Cape Town – and South Africa – their destination of choice, and will impact their activities should they visit.”
Duminy said the outages were having a significant impact across almost every tourism business, and on CTT’s efforts to market Cape Town to global travellers.
Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (Satsa) CEO David Frost said: “Travellers require a high level of certainty and anything friction-based, like load shedding, has an influence on their travel experience.
“As South Africa competes with so many destinations in the world for tourism arrivals and spend, we need to do everything in our power to deliver that certainty. Part of that is private sector putting in place mitigation measures, the other is government entities delivering an environment that is conducive to us operating properly.”
Frost previously said there have been situations where guests have moved to other properties because they were not aware that their property did not have load shedding back-up plans.
Energy Mayco member Beverley van Reenen said these difficulties informed the City’s energy supply plans to mitigate up to four stages of Eskom’s load-shedding, with a number of breakthroughs being reached recently.
“Our latest initiative is our largest power procurement tender, which will see the City approach the open market on Thursday for around 500MW of dispatchable power.
Besides bringing more renewable energy sources into our grid, the aim is to build an affordable, reliable and resilient power supply for all Cape Town residents and businesses,” Van Reenen said.
Van Reenen also highlighted the uptake of Small-Scale Embedded Generation (SSEG) with both residential and commercial customers within the City’s supply areas able to install grid-tied rooftop solar systems, battery systems and others to generate power for themselves and feedback their surplus into the grid for cash.
Duminy said CTT was prepared to support tourism businesses to making the most of these various initiatives.
Economic growth Mayco member James Vos added that the energy crisis and climate change made it important to invest in the green economy while helping more Capetonians to secure employment in a new industry.
“Cost-effective energy efficiency improvements can have positive macro-economic impacts that boost economic activity and lead to increased employment … With an increased demand for solar panels, we can create job opportunities for the millions of currently unemployed South Africans,” Vos said.
