juwi Renewable Energies’ subsidiary, juwi Solar ZA O&M 1 (“juwi”) has been awarded the contract for the operations and maintenance (O&M) of the Touwsrivier CPV Solar Project in the Western Cape of South Africa, effective from 1 April 2020.

The project has a capacity of 36 ΜWac / 44 MWdc. The installation uses concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) modules, mounted on 1500 dual axis CX-S530-II solar tracking systems divided into 30sections. Each system supports 12 CX-M500 modules which are each rated to produce 2450 W (under reference conditions).

The installation reached full capacity in December 2014 and is one of the largest operating CPV facilities in the world. Electricity produced by the plant is fed into the national grid operated by Eskom under a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA).

juwi Head of Operations & Maintenance -EMEA, Christos Charalampidis, says that they willuse a combination of internal resources and subcontractors:“We are ideally positioned to manage and are very pleased to be partnering with the Touwsrivier CPV Solar Project.

“juwi runs a tight ship for preventative maintenance with standardized processes. Based on twenty years of experience operating PV plants we have set protocols in place to ensure seamless O&M services, like the Facility Operating Plan customized to suit the technology, equipment and local conditions of each individual plant, the Task Work Orders system and detailed checklists.

 “We place highly trained and experienced people on site that do preventive maintenance on an ongoing basis using our well-established processes and procedures.”

Additionally, Charalampidis outlines that “Our Task Work Orders system monitors, both locally and centrally, each item of work and highlights if something drops below the time schedule or if more effort/resources are needed on a certain plant. All works requiring outage of power units are done outside production hours to avoid energy losses.”

Charalampidis says that juwi's continuous high quality in operations and maintenance is being regularly audited, both internally and externally. The quality management systems of both juwi O&M (Germany) and O&M (South Africa) have been certified according to DIN EN ISO 9001:2015.

“Effective O&M requires meticulously laid out procedures and method statements for each item of work, everything being pre-approved by our internal engineers and specialists. All possible scenarios are examined and each and every risk is mitigated prior to the commencement of works – and all that is done within very limited time frames.”