Wind wall could turn CT into hub port

Ray Smuts
IF CAPE Town's proposed wind wall is successful, the mother city could become a serious hub port with a growth rate of up to 30% per annum for two or three years before more container berths become desirable.
That's the view of port engineer Derek Visser, who says new berths could be sited where the envisaged project to increase container stacking space by extending 300 metres out to sea will ultimately come about.
Visser says there are different understandings of what a hub port is, his being that cargo is transferred from one ship to another when the first vessel is not heading for the required destination.
As to what the viability of the wind wall could mean for the Port of Cape Town, Visser asserts: "First of all, the shipping lines will have to solve the problem of identical tariffs from Europe to South Africa irrespective of where the container is dropped off.
"That impacts negatively on Cape Town because one could actually say the city is subsidising the Durban traffic. If Cape Town had a different tariff to the other ports we could attract a lot of Reef traffic."
As an example, he quotes carmaker BMW which rails its boxes from Cape Town to Rossing near Pretoria "and they get there three days earlier than had they been railed from Durban."
The wind wall is currently the subject of intensive study by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.