Kuyasa residential development

Overview

Kuyasa, a low-income housing settlement in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, is South Africa’s first Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project with solar thermal technology. It aims at installing solar water heaters (SWH) in existing low-income houses. Each SWH helps to reduce around 1.29 tonnes of CO2 per household and year. The South African Government and the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism fund this project.

Implementation started in August 2008. So far, over 700 low-pressure solar water heaters, with a capacity of 110 litres each, have been installed in the area.

The CDM is one of the flexible mechanisms from the Kyoto Protocol. It enables South African project engineers to develop emission-reducing projects that can earn them sellable certified emission reduction (CER) credits, each of them equal to one ton of CO2. Over 2,300 houses will be equipped with solar water heaters in Kuyasa, which will cost about 12 million South African Rand (ZAR). 4,000 more houses that will be built in the coming years will already have solar water heaters installed.

Cape Town Green Map
updated 01/2010 by urban sprout