Spain is providing €2.1 billion ($2.3 billion) to help fund South Africa’s energy transition and water needs, even as some of the world’s richest nations struggle to push forward on a groundbreaking climate-finance initiative with the continent’s most-industrialized country.
The Spanish funding is being provided through a mixture of financial instruments, with the country’s government working with its development finance institution, COFIDES, and South Africa’s Industrial Development Corp., said Ambassador Raimundo Robredo Rubio.
While not part of it, the Spanish initiative is in line with the aims of the $8.5 billion just energy transition partnership, or JETP, between South Africa and funding partners including France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.
“This is the first time in history we have done something like this,” Robredo said in an interview at his nation’s embassy in Pretoria, the capital. “It is tailor-made just for South Africa,” with the potential to replicate it in other countries, he said.
According to Pretoria-based Spanish ambassador Raimundo Robredo Rubio, the funding is being provided through a mixture of financial instruments, with his government working with its own development finance institution of Cofides and South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation.
Pretoria produced an energy transition plan last year that estimated it would need at least US$84 billion to invest in the programme over the next five years.
The US$2.3 billion funding comes at a time when frequent breakdowns of aging coal-fired plants have subjected the country to a rotational loadshedding lasting for more than six hours a day.
The energy transition programme has been hailed as a pioneering example of how rich nations could help wean developing nations off their dependence on coal as a generator of electricity.
“This is the first time in history we have done something like this. It is tailor-made just for South Africa, with the potential to replicate it in other countries,” the envoy said.
