Globeleq Taps Sungrow for Africa's Largest Battery at Red Sands

• Globeleq chooses Sungrow to supply its 153-MW/612-MWh Red Sands BESS in South Africa’s Northern Cape, a US $300 m project slated to curb load-shedding from 2027.

Globeleq has selected Chinese storage giant Sungrow to equip its 153-MW / 612-MWh Red Sands battery energy-storage system (BESS) in South Africa, signing a supply and 15-year service term-sheet that anchors the continent’s most ambitious standalone battery project to date.

Sited about 100 km south-east of Upington in the Northern Cape, Red Sands is the flagship winner of South Africa’s new Energy Storage Capacity Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (ESIPPPP). The plant will sprawl across five hectares beside Eskom’s Garona substation, soaking up surplus midday solar and wind power and releasing it into the evening peak to ease the country’s chronic load-shedding bouts.

Globeleq pegs the investment at US $300 million (ZAR 5.7 billion) and expects construction to last 24 months once financial close is reached late next year, putting commercial operations on track for 2027. Designed for four hours of discharge, the system will be able to cover the after-dark demand of roughly 160,000 households while stabilising voltage on the Kimberley–Cape corridor.

Under the deal Sungrow will supply its liquid-cooled PowerTitan 2.0 modules and assume long-term operations and maintenance, a package Globeleq says de-risks performance while allowing for South African assembly partners. “This strategic handshake turns vision into gigawatt-hour-scale reality,” noted Paolo de Michelis, Globeleq’s head of renewables.

Red Sands is the company’s first utility-scale storage asset in South Africa, complementing eight existing solar and wind plants (384 MW) and a solar-plus-storage hybrid in Mozambique. Management view the project as a launch pad for a wider storage pipeline expected in upcoming ESIPPPP rounds.

For Sungrow, the win extends a flurry of African contracts and comes amid updated South-African grid-code rules that fast-track battery integration and aim to unlock at least 2 GW of new storage capacity by 2030.