Every year as spring approaches, the annual fynbos show in Hopefield draws thousands of tourists to this region of critical biodiversity in the Western Cape.
Local hotel owner Jacques van der Westhuizen says the festival draws up to 8,000 visitors and is a source of pride for residents. He collects as many species as he can find in the surrounding veld for an exhibition that forms part of the show.
But this year his attention is on a different kind of development on the edge of the town about 120km north of Cape Town. Phelan Green Group, a global renewable energy supplier owned by the Phelan family, from Ireland, has proposed a R47bn green hydrogen (GH2) and electro-sustainable aviation fuel (eSAF) project that would place a 1.6GW solar farm and an industrial fuel plant on agricultural land whose boundary is about 1km from Hopefield.
At full capacity, the project is expected to produce 140,000t of eSAF a year for export to Europe. It will be developed in three phases, with the final phase expected to be completed in 2032.
The project’s footprint is significant: the solar component alone is expected to cover more than 3,000ha.
Residents are now asking whether Phelan’s promise of a green energy future comes at the expense of the region’s most valuable assets.
Master plan
The small town of roughly 6,000 inhabitants is close to the West Coast National Park and Saldanha Bay’s Freeport industrial development zone (IDZ). The only evidence of outside development are the turbines of the nearby Umoya wind farm, which feeds renewable energy into the national grid.
Hopefield is part of the Saldanha Bay municipality, identified as a potential hub in the West Coast GH2 master plan because of its renewable resources, existing industrial infrastructure and proximity to the Saldanha Bay special economic zone.
The Western Cape government has ambitious plans for GH2, including facilitating up to 15GW of renewable energy for projects.
According to Oxpeckers #PowerTracker data, there are 16 GH2 projects, in various stages, throughout South Africa. Four of these, including Phelan’s project, are in the Western Cape. The combined estimated annual production capacity of these, where quantified, is 190,000t-195,000t of GH2 or its direct fuel derivatives.
While smaller proof-of-concept projects have been demonstrated, the Western Cape does not yet have any commercial GH2 plants.
A related concern is the rise in mining applications for phosphate in the region. In early 2025, the non-profit Protect the West Coast raised environmental concerns about an application to mine phosphate on a farm near Langebaan, 35km from Hopefield. The project received environmental authorisation from the Western Cape department of mineral & petroleum resources in July 2026.
There is also the Kropz phophate mine at Elandsfontein, right outside the town, which can produce up to 1.5Mt of phosphate rock concentrate a year.
Fynbos on the frontline
Botanist Nick Helme told #PowerTracker the proposed Hopefield development area has an unusually high concentration of threatened plant species because two major vegetation systems meet there: sand fynbos on the deep acidic sands to the west and clay-based vegetation associated with the renosterveld of Swartland to the east, making it an ecological transition zone.
He said one portion of the proposed solar development, on Theewatersvlei farm, has roughly double the plant diversity that would normally be expected for an area of its size. About 25 threatened species have been identified in the greater project area, including species occurring in Hopefield sand fynbos.
The area also contains Piketberg quartz succulent shrubland, a unique, arid habitat type that is found along the Sout River. “My assessment is this [project] would have a high negative botanical impact,” Helme said.
He asked why the development could not be moved to an already degraded area. “I haven’t seen any suggestion of an alternative locality or any strong reasoning as to why this is the preferred locality,” he said. “Move this thing 20km to the east into the highly degraded Swartland system, and you’ve got no environmental issues.”
Mark Botha, an environmental professional specialising in land protection and conservation strategy, said Saldanha already has industrial infrastructure and an established IDZ. “How do you make hydrogen green by putting it on a greenfields area and trashing biodiversity?” he asked.
Participation processes
Anthea Abraham, the head of communications at Phelan Green Energy, told #PowerTracker that the site in Hopefield had been “identified as the best possible location after multiple site assessments and regulatory requirements”.
Biodiversity had been identified as a critical aspect in the initial environmental impact assessment (EIA) stages, she said, and CapeNature as a commenting authority had requested additional biodiversity investigations and information. These specialist studies are being undertaken to assess potential impacts and identify mitigation measures.
For Hopefield residents, the environmental concerns have been compounded by how they say the project was presented to them.
Van der Westhuizen said the development has largely taken residents by surprise. They first heard about plans for a solar farm in 2025. At the time, many assumed it would be comparable to other solar developments elsewhere in the province.
“When people hear ‘solar farm’, they think about the type of solar farm De Aar or Touws River has. I’ve seen them. They’re not that bad,” he said, referring to projects that occupy between 100ha and 200ha. “It’s only when we saw the draft scoping report that we realised the scale of the project. It wasn’t just a solar farm, it’s a mega solar farm.”
A year later, they discovered that the project involved much more than solar: “It wasn’t just going to be a solar farm, there would be a hydrogen plant as well.”
Then residents found references to a biomass burner and a wind component. “Every step of the way we discover that there’s another component. We don’t know the full extent of the project,” Van der Westhuizen said.
The solar farm and GH2/eSAF development are being assessed through separate environmental processes, with different environmental assessment practitioners (EAPs) reporting to different authorities. This has made it difficult for residents to understand the cumulative impact of developments that, though assessed separately, will occupy the same landscape.
Nicola Viljoen, chair of the West Coast Environmental Protection Association, said for projects of this scale EAPs should have substantive meetings with communities to explain the highly technical documents. By splitting the project into two separate components, residents have faced more paperwork than expected, she said.
The comment periods for the current draft scoping processes have closed, and applications for water use and atmospheric emissions remain part of the regulatory process ahead.
Residents have responded by creating WhatsApp groups to share documents, specialist reports and information, and have started compiling information from the draft reports and specialists on environmental laws to understand what the project is all about.
“We feel it’s quite unfair that they haven’t come to the community to explain the different projects on a deeper level, and how they’re going to impact our area,” said Hopefield resident Des Coetzee.
Phelan’s Abraham responded that the two project components have “unique inherent technical scopes, characteristics and complexities that require dedicated technology, design, engineering and technical inputs. Environmental legislation dictates different competent authorities responsible for authorising the projects/project components — the national department of forestry, fisheries & environment for solar, and the provincial department of environmental affairs & development planning for eSAF — which necessitates two EIA processes.
“The technical scopes put each component on a different project trajectory in terms of timescales, design/engineering, technology, et cetera. Phelan Green is adhering to these two processes to ensure process compliance and integrity,” she said.
Worries about water
Beyond the threats to the fynbos, Viljoen is concerned about water use. “Hopefield is in a semi-arid region and this year we’ve not had the rainfall that we normally have. Going into summer, we’re already concerned that there’s going to be enough water to supply Hopefield,” she said.
According to the final scoping report, the project will use 8-million litres of potable water a day, at full production.
Abraham told #PowerTracker the first phase will require 2-million litres of water per day, which will be supplied by Saldanha Bay municipality, while longer-term water security is expected to involve desalination and the clearing of alien vegetation. She added that the municipality is now assessing water provision for phase 1.
“The plant itself has also been designed as a zero liquid discharge facility, meaning process water is recycled and reused within the plant to the greatest extent possible, rather than being discharged as effluent. This significantly reduces the plant’s overall water demand and reinforces the project’s water-conscious design approach,” Abraham said.
Groundwater system
Residents are particularly concerned about the relationship between the proposed plant, groundwater and nearby waterways. A GH2 facility that uses desalinated seawater can discharge a highly concentrated chemical brine as waste.
The hydrogen plant would be about 800m from the Sout River, which flows into the Berg River and ultimately the sea. The proposed development would be built above a groundwater system connected to the wider coastal environment.
Van der Westhuisen fears effluent contamination could have consequences well beyond Hopefield, noting that if it happens on the surface, it could easily end up in the Berg River. On the other hand, contamination of the underground aquifer system could impact the Langebaan Lagoon.
Both the lagoon and river are Ramsar sites, wetland areas recognised as being of international importance under the international Ramsar Convention.
Abraham said the company will comply with all national and international laws in relation to water use, discharge and environmental protection, as well as chemical and fuel handling facilities. She said all zones where contamination risk exists will be contained if any leaks do occur.
Hydrogeologist Dale Barrow, of Groundwater & Geo-Environmental Solutions, the company Phelan tasked to assess the sustainability of the project’s water needs, told #PowerTracker that the underwater aquifer system in the area is “complex”, and with current information it’s “difficult to predict impacts”.
False hope
The project is expected to create about 2,500 jobs over more than five years, and 500 permanent operational and maintenance jobs when fully up and running, according to Abraham. Training and skills development will aim to support longer-term employment opportunities, she said.
Resident and community worker George April, now in his 70s, said while there is high unemployment in the area, he is concerned that the talk of job creation might bring false hope among his neighbours and that the new development might jeopardise existing employment.
April pointed out that each day buses collect workers employed at Arnelia, a wholesale nursery near Hopefield, and during the harvesting season even more people are employed there. “We understand that there will be a lot of construction work and many people will get work, but after a year or two there will be no work. They need skilled people [for the permanent jobs],” he said.
This article was originally published by Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism. This investigation was supported by the Oxpeckers #PowerTracker programme, New Economy Hub and Ford Foundation.
