Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies announced on 25 September that he had encouraged Tesla Company to work with the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) and the South African government to explore the possibility of setting up the manufacturing of Tesla products in South Africa.
Tesla apparently expressed an interest in investing in South Africa during a business breakfast session in Washington, DC in the United States of America (USA) where the Minister was addressing investors, focusing on priorities and interventions for putting South Africa’s economy on a new growth path and on investment and infrastructure opportunities.
Tesla Motors is an automotive and energy storage company that designs, manufactures and sells electric car components and batteries. The founder of the company is the South-African born billionaire Elon Musk - a leading entrepreneur. The minister indicated that South Africa’s motor development programme already had an additional incentive that applied to electric vehicles. He further stated that government understood that electric vehicles were where things were - going including hybrids and fuel cells.
The minister also reiterated that government was still on track with the Independent Power Producers Programme (IPP) on renewable energy. He emphasised that the investors were telling him that the IPP programme was one of the best power purchasing programmes in the world. The minister singled out the solar energy and wing energy technologies as the main beneficiaries of the programme. The main challenge of renewables - especially wind energy and photovoltaic solar (PV) has been the storage issue but concentrated solar power (CSP) is providing a solution.