Abstract
The South African challenges of sustainable and reliable electricity supply has resulted in a need to rapidly introduce clean energy to mitigate the electricity crisis the country is facing, via a fast-paced increase in awarding of renewable energy projects to the best bidders in the country. Consequently, this rapid uptake has led to delays in meeting renewable energy project targets on time. Four renewable energy projects rounds have been awarded and executed. Round five, which covers emergency projects, are still to be executed but have been awarded to bidders.
From initial renewable energy project market scanning surveys and stakeholder engagements, it was discovered that there is a lot of project management delays in delivering the awarded and already executed projects by government within the agreed timelines. The research problem was therefore to explore and investigate the delay factors on renewable energy projects and how to mitigate the crisis that the country is currently facing to have stable electricity supply, by executing renewable energy projects under stipulated budgets and on schedule.
For data collection purposes, several role players within the renewable energy industry space were chosen to participate and accomplish the research objectives. Most of the participants that were targeted for data collection were industry professionals such as design engineers, project managers, technical managers, project engineers, commissioning managers, planners, and contracts managers. The qualitative research method was used to collect the data. Survey questions were distributed to 27 participants, and a satisfactory response rate of 78% (21 responses) was achieved in responding to and answering the survey questionnaire. The percentage achieved for responses was deemed satisfactory to certify the successful outcome of the research, which was to explore the delay factors and current challenges encountered by construction project managers towards completing renewable energy projects under stipulated timeframes, scopes, and budgets.
The challenges identified agree with existing literature, and include the inadequate capacity of contractors or their subcontractors to handle multiple projects concurrently; poor financial management skills of contractors which result in project delay implications; poor project management skills by contracting teams which derail the project progress and has potential to ignite cost escalations; and discrepancies during supply chain management and procurement stages which causes delays in projects as well as ignite cost escalation implications.