Swedish energy storage specialist Polarium has opened a lithium-ion battery assembly plant in Montague Park, Cape Town.
The facility is the group’s third in the world, with the other two plants in Mexico and Vietnam.
The Cape Town plant will employ 200 people, and will supply mainly the local and rest-of-Africa telecommunications tower markets.
The facility has a capacity of 300 000 batteries a year, equivalent to 4 GWh, to be assembled on three lines from imported cells.
More than 90% of production will be exported to the rest of the continent.
The factory will be powered by a combination of solar power and Polarium’s energy storage solutions, making it a net contributor to the South African power grid.
The opening of the Cape Town facility follows a multimillion-dollar bulk purchase agreement between American Tower Corporation (ATC) Africa and Polarium, signed last year.
ATC has been switching steadily from diesel generators and traditional lead-acid battery storage to lithium-ion systems in Africa, explains ATC South Africa CEO Anne Mclaren.
“We often have to provide uptime in markets with low power-grid availability, so we have generators that run to the side of our towers. “Lithium-ion batteries are more sustainable and offer a longer life cycle than other solutions.”
Mclaren notes that the switch has allowed ATC Africa to save on the use of 95-million litres of diesel since 2018.
ATC is active in six African countries outside South Africa, and has about 22 000 tower sites on the continent.
“Being connected is being included,” says McClaren.
Polarium CEO Stefan Jansson says Polarium signs contracts with its customers to retrieve the company’s batteries at the end of their life cycle, with 95% of the material in the old batteries recycled into new batteries.