Environmental Affairs on Gazetting of Renewable Energy Development Zones

Cabinet on Wednesday, 17 February 2016, approved the gazetting of 8 Renewable Energy Development Zones (REDZ) and 5 Power Corridors.

These Renewable Energy Development Zones and Power Corridors are geographical areas where wind and solar Photovoltaic technologies can be incentivised and where 'deep' grid expansion can be directed and where regulatory processes will be streamlined.

The REDZs act as energy generation hubs, and provide anchor points for grid expansion thereby allowing for strategic and proactive expansion of grid into these areas. This will ensure that the grid expansion does not hamper the progress of the renewable energy power purchase agreement process.

The REDZs and Power Corridors support 2 of the 18 Strategic Integrated Projects (SIPs) which were identified in the Infrastructure Development Plan which is aimed at promoting catalytic infrastructure development to stimulate economic growth and job creation.

To ensure that when required, environmental authorisations are not a cause for delay, the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) embarked on a program of Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) for large-scale developments to support the SIPs. The intention of undertaking Strategic Environmental Assessments is to pre-assess environmental sensitivities within the proposed development areas at a regional scale to simplify the site specific environmental impact assessments (EIA) when they are undertaken, and to focus the assessment requirements to addressing the specific sensitivity of the site.

The REDZs and Power Corridors were identified through the development of 3 Strategic Environmental Assessments as part of the Departments Strategic Environmental Assessment programme. The outputs of these 3 SEAs must now be gazetted to allow them to be implemented.

The outputs of the SEAs directly relate to several government priorities including:

Contributing to...