Olagunju is the fresh face of renewable energy in Africa. By a twist of fate, this young lawyer, who grew up with her grandmother by candlelight, is now spearheading Africa’s dash for energy. “I’ve always known I was going to go into resources. I just didn’t know if it was going to be mining or oil and gas... The biggest thing for me is why Africa, which is so well-endowed in resources, remains the poorest continent. I always hated injustice, growing up in apartheid South Africa,” she says. Her deals have put two wind farms and two solar photovoltaic (PV) farms onto the barren landscape of De Aar in the Northern Cape. Two deals she patched together that will contribute 254MW to South Africa’s energy grid. Olagunju’s childhood was far from electricity. She grew up in Matatiele, a village in the Eastern Cape 782 kilometers from the boardrooms of Sandown where she now works and lives with her Nigerian-born husband. This may be a drop in the ocean but it’s a very important one. Renewables have been a saving grace. According to Olagunju, 39 of these projects are up and running, supplying 2,050MW to the South Africa’s energy grid.
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When Luke Callcott-Stevens, Gavin James and Doug Jenman first talked to FORBES AFRICA in 2012, they struggled to imagine what their $274-million 100MW Dorper Wind Farm, in South Africa, would look like. “The first project people assumed big risks. We built a wind farm, we installed it. All those are effectively at the cost of capital. Now it’s done… Every three days a wind turbine is being installed in South Africa,” says Jenman. Forty wind turbines and two and a half years later, this trio from Rainmaker Energy can not only take pictures of Dorper, a tiny town in the Eastern Cape province, they are now imagining that they can cover the rooftops of London with solar panels. “The cities of tomorrow will produce their own electricity. We won’t need power stations,” says James.
