Cennergi (Pty) Ltd

South Africa’s chronic shortage of electrical energy has prompted the private sector to join this industry, especially in the areas of solar- and wind-based power generation.

Cennergi has plans to contribute in the order of 2000 MW to the national grid by 2020. This is significantly more than two of Medupi power station’s six 800MW generators which will be due to come on line at about the same time. Efficiency is the key to meeting this goal and so the company decided that they needed a centralised information system at their Centurion head office, between Johannesburg and Pretoria that would help them optimise generation capacity at their remote sites. Centralised and detailed information regarding the performance of each facility would allow Cennergi’s technical team to better evaluate the need for upgrades while minimising their presence on site.

Project scope

It was decided that a reporting solution should be implemented to analyse and report on the power collection and generation aspects of both wind farms. This led the following requirements for each site:

• Real-time data collection facilities that must cope with disparate systems and sources. It should be noted that the wind farms were erected and are managed by different companies with different systems (i.e. Nordex and Vestas).
• Forwarding of data to a central repository at head office securely while catering for a possible loss of connection.
• Consolidate all data and maintain its integrity.
• Data aggregation, calculation and provision for manual data entry must be provided.
• Make provision for customisable and user-driven real-time textual and graphical reports that would be available to all shareholders.
• Deliver reports to multiple platforms and devices.
• The solution must be able to exchange data with other applications.
• Provide notifications on underperforming or failed assets

Cennergi (Pty) Ltd is a Southern African-based diversified Independent Power Producer. The company’s shareholders are Exxaro Resources Ltd and The Tata Power Company Ltd, who are using Cennergi to combine local experience with international power project experience.

Cennergi’s vision is to become a diversified, profitable African energy business that owns and operates a balanced portfolio of energy assets throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, across the energy value chain thereby delivering reliable, affordable energy to its customers and acceptable returns to its shareholders.

The company is committed to generating cleaner energy through a mixed portfolio of generation assets including wind, solar, hydro, gas and coal.

One of Cennergi’s goals is to achieve an emissions factor of between 0.5 and 0.7 tons of CO₂ per MWh – lower than the carbon footprint of the region.