About the Event

The Renewable Energy Festival is a product of collaboration between the Alternative Information Development Agency (AIDC) {hyperlink to AIDC website} and the World Wide Fund for Nature South Africa (WWF-SA) {hyperlink to WWF SA website}. The festival is inspired by each organisation’s current campaigns – the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign {hyperlink to campaign page} and the Seize Your Power campaign {hyperlink to SYP campaign page}.

AIDC

AIDC was formed in 1996 in response to the democratic transition in South Africa and the new opportunities and challenges it brought those seeking greater social justice within the democracy.
Its Vision is: A sustainable society free of racism, xenophobia, sexism, resource degradation, oppression, exploitation and alienation, where people live in dignity and govern by participatory democracy are respected and free to realise their potential productivity and creativity and live in peace without fear and in harmony with the environment.
One Million Climate Jobs Campaign:
The campaign is an alliance of labour, social movements and other civil society organisations in South Africa that recognise the value of A collective approach to the crises of unemployment and climate change. It is based on well-researched solutions for how South Africa can immediately begin a just transition to a low carbon economy.

WWF South Africa

WWF-SA is part of an international conservation organisation which prides itself on science-based interventions.
Its aims are to:

• Conserve the biodiversity assets (endangered wildlife, species, habitats and ecosystems) of South Africa
• Ensure natural ecosystems and their services are appropriately valued and integrated into sustainable development
• Play a leading role among developing countries in addressing the risks and opportunities associated with climate change
• Improve the livelihoods of communities who are most directly dependent on natural resources through better environmental practices
• Inform South African consumers to influence appropriate environmental practice from the private and public sectors
• Instil a culture of environmental responsibility in Business and Industry (including agriculture, fishing and mining)
• Advocate for government policies incorporating sound environmental principles that promote, maintain and enhance biodiversity and ecological services
• Increase environmental skills and capacity among current and future leaders

Seize Your Power Campaign

WWF is campaigning globally to seek major public commitments from governments and international financial institutions to make new investments in the renewable energy sector. In the South African context WWF is calling for double the effort and double the ambition.  In other words, government needs to pull out all the stops to remove outstanding barriers and to look at innovative ways of reducing the financial cost of renewables. WWF believes that such ambition is vital, not only in terms of climate change in the long term, but in terms of South Africa's current energy crisis. 

Terms & Conditions

Coming soon.

Johan van den Berg
SAWEA CEO, B Com LLM

Johan van den Berg is the CEO of the South African Wind Energy Association, the Interim Chair of the South African Renewable Energy Council and the African Private Sector Focal Point for the Africa-EU Energy Partnership. An Advocate since 1993, he has spent the last fifteen years in environmental dispute resolution; environmental mediation; climate change avoidance/emissions trading and support for renewable energy deployment in Southern Africa.

Ferrial Adam

Ferrial Adam is an environmental justice activist who has been working on environmental issues for more than 15 years. She is presently a senior energy and climate change campaigner for Greenpeace Africa. She holds a masters in environmental management. Her areas of interest include mobilisation around climate change and developing sustainable models for energy efficiency and development.

Achmad Chotia

Achmat has been a teacher since 1977 and has been teaching at Glendale Secondary School in Rocklands, Mitchell’s Plain, since 1983. Glendale played a prominent part in the struggle against apartheid education during the 1980s.

He was appointed Principal of this large school in 1995 and is still Principal of the school some 19 years later. His presence has provided the stability needed to transform his school into a model of what can be done, despite the challenges of the deprivations of the neighbourhood and many of the school’s learners. He is the first to acknowledge that the success of the school would not have been possible without the dedicated support of a hard-working and committed group of teachers.

A measure of his success was that Glendale was selected to host visits by both Presidents Mandela and Zuma.

Achmat responded with huge enthusiasm to his school being one of the two selected for the Alternative Information & Development Centre’s pilot project on Sustainable Schools.

Frank Spencer

Frank Spencer, commonly known as “the solar boy genius” is multi-disciplinary engineer and businessperson, with over 13 years’ experience in solar Photovoltaics. As the CEO of Emergent Energy, he has been involved with the design, delivery and financing of solar PV projects in the off-grid and on-grid markets of Southern Africa, and led the development of a pipeline of over 9MW of commercial-scale solar projects, with the first 100s of kW under construction. In addition, he has worked on a number of energy efficiency, green building and policy related projects.

Jason Schäffler

Jason Schäffler is an experienced project developer and technical and policy analyst specialised in renewable energy. He has researched the environmental and economic benefits of distributed electricity generation in depth, and has been an advocate for renewable energy policy at both the provincial and national levels in South Africa.

Dinga Sikwebu

Dinga Sikwebu is the Head of Education at NUMSA, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. He is responsible for shop steward training; political education; the production of internal education material; leadership and staff development within the union.

Dinga has recently coordinated the work of worker-based energy research groups within NUMSA focusing on the development of the renewable energy technology sector in South Africa and union approaches to workplace energy efficiency programmes. As the Head of Education, Dinga has been instrumental in the development of NUMSA’s climate change policy. In February 2012, he jointly coordinated NUMSA’s first international conference on building a socially-owned renewable energy sector in South Africa.

Mark Swilling

Mark Swilling is appointed as Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership, University of Stellenbosch (www.sopmp.sun.ac.za) and Academic Director of the Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.net). He is responsible for the design and implementation of a Master’s and Doctoral Program in Sustainable Development that gets delivered at the Sustainability Institute in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He also heads up the TSAMA Hub, a new Center for the transdisciplinary study of sustainability and complexity at Stellenbosch University (www.tsama.org.za). The TSAMA Hub hosts a new transdisciplinary Doctoral Program that involves collaboration between seven of Stellenbosch University’s Faculties. Professor Swilling obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick in 1994.

Gisella Prasad

Gisela has a PhD in geology from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and taught geology at the Universities of Khartoum/Sudan, and Dar es Salaam/Tanzania. She was the director of the Institute of Southern African Studies, a development- and policy-oriented research centre at the National University of Lesotho. In 2001 she joined the Energy Research Centre at the University of Cape Town. She is Programme leader for the Energy, Poverty and Development group.

Current research interests are include the supply, use and development impact of energy and energy technologies on the poor. Policies, strategies and business models of improving energy access for the poor and climate finance for energy access. Energy transition for poverty alleviation.

She teaches in the masters course on Energy, Poverty and Development and supervises masters and PhD students.

Philip Goyn

Dr Philip Goyns is the Supply Option Modelling Specialist at the Department of Energy.

He joined the Department four years ago as part of the Energy Planning team. Dr Goyns is involved in the Development of the Integrated Energy Plan and his key responsibilities include developing and maintaining an energy system optimisation model, quantitative analysis of the impact of government policies on the current and future structure of the energy sector and research into existing and potential energy supply options to inform energy policies and planning processes.

Dr Goyns’ has an Masters in Mechanical Engineering and a Doctorate in Energy Studies. He has also been involved in Postdoctoral research in Energy Economics. Carolyn Cramer