Siemens Turbines to Run S. Africa Wind Farms

Siemens will supply and install turbines for a 9 billion rand ($770 million) project to build three wind farms in South Africa with a combined capacity to generate 360 megawatts of power, it said on Wednesday.

Africa's most advanced economy is battling chronic energy shortages that are pushing its government to seek alternative sources of energy from its fleet of coal-powered stations that take much longer to build than wind farms.

The German industrial group signed a contract with Mainstream Renewable Power, a Dublin-based clean-energy developer that is planning to build a $1.9 billion solar and wind electricity project in Africa.

Mainstream said construction will begin on the three wind farms this month.

The new energy project aims to produce 700-900 megawatts of electricity in the next three years with wind and solar projects already earmarked for South Africa, Ghana and Egypt.

The World Bank estimates electricity outages on average cost African countries around 2.1 percent of GDP with current output only meeting half of demand and 70 percent of the continent's population living without power.

South Africa faces years of power shortages as engineers step up maintenance to overhaul power plants ran by state-run utility Eskom that have been run too hard over the years to compensate for a lack of new generation capacity.

Reporting by Joe Brock and Zandi Shabalala