Palmiet Pumped Storage Project

Another story worth dealing with here is the origin of the Palmiet Pumped Storage Project near Grabouw in the Cape. One day, Neville Pells of the consulting firm Ninham Shand and Partners, walked into my office. He said that he was busy with an idea similar to the Drakensberg project, combining water supply and hydro. This would obviate a very expensive and risky tunnel through the uncertain geology of the area between the Palmiet River and the Steenbras River. At the time, supply from the Palmiet for use in the Cape Town area was under consideration. Ninham Shand was probably pro-actively looking at such possibilities. He said to me that the lack of a site for an upper reservoir was hampering him. I took out the 1:50 000 map of the area and noticed a relatively flat area, which is now the basin of the Rockview Dam, the upper reservoir of the Palmiet PS Project. A provisional planimeter exercise by Piet Pretorius of my office and a later proper survey by Pells confirmed the required capacity. When we first went to visit the site, we found a surveyor working there. I asked him what he was doing, but he declined to answer and referred me to Somchem in Somerset West. During my visit there I learned that Krygkor was considering the site for launching rockets. I pleaded that they look somewhere else, because the site was unique for our purposes and irreplaceable. From then on the issue was referred to and taken further by Escom, who eventually appointed Ninham Shand as their consultants. At the time, I kept my eyes open for other possible pumped storage sites and drew Bruno Graber’s attention to a site using Voëlvlei Dam as lower reservoir and a valley behind the crest of the Elandsberg as upper reservoir. This was eventually fully studied and even drilled by Escom, but so far, nothing further came of it.