Latest news with #RedRocket
IOL News
a day ago
- Business
- IOL News
How Western Cape is leading the charge in renewable energy
The Western Cape is positioning itself as a significant player in South Africa's renewable energy sector, as Premier Winde acknowledged the contributions of independent power producers (IPPs) such as Red Rocket to the province's energy resilience efforts. Premier Winde hosted Matteo Brambilla, CEO of Cape Town-based energy firm Red Rocket, during a special 'on-the-road' edition of the province's weekly energy digicon. The event was held at the company's head office, where Winde toured its state-of-the-art 'Command Centre', a digital hub that tracks real-time energy generation across Red Rocket's renewable projects stretching from the Western Cape to Uganda. Winde said the Western Cape Energy Resilience Programme aims to support the private sector and municipalities in generating a reliable and affordable supply of energy.
Daily Maverick
20-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Hi-tech protection for birds at risk from SA's wind turbine farms
What has been described as 'South Africa's first automated bird protection system' has gone live at Red Rocket's Brandvalley and Rietkloof wind farms, using AI-powered detection and turbine shutdowns to protect vulnerable species. An automated bird protection system has been installed at Red Rocket's wind farms between the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces in South Africa with advanced shutdown-on-demand functionality. The system has been fully installed and is active at the 144MW Brandvalley and 144MW Rietkloof Wind Farms, which announced the commencement of commercial operations in April and are the first two projects under Round 5 of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) to take on this technology. Developed in partnership with international avian monitoring specialists Bioseco, the system uses advanced detection and shutdown-on-demand technology to prevent bird collisions with turbine blades – a persistent and controversial issue in wind energy development. The system employs a suite of optical sensors and intelligent software to continuously monitor the airspace around selected turbines in bird-sensitive areas. When a bird is detected approaching the danger zone, the system first deploys visual and audio deterrents. If the bird continues on a collision course, it automatically triggers a temporary shutdown of the turbine, allowing the bird to pass safely. How it works is that modern camera-based systems, like the Bioseco Bird Protection System (BPS), mount six to eight stereovision modules on each turbine tower. The cameras monitor birds in real time, 360 degrees around the turbine. Red Rocket's environmental and social manager, Ashleigh von der Heyden, and Sustainable Investments director Magdalena Michalowska Logan explained. They said the system was configured to detect various sizes of bird species based on the wingspan of the species. And when a bird (or flock) under conservation concern enters the 'danger zone', the system can initiate different tiers of mitigation, starting with non-harmful deterrent mechanisms, then moving on to automated turbine shutdown. In case of automatic shutdown, Von Der Heyden and Logan said the relevant turbine received a 'stop command' and feathered its blades until the bird/birds had cleared the zone, after which it automatically restarted. Depending on the turbine technology, they said it would typically take about 40 seconds to shut down the turbine. This, in turn, was considered when sizing the trigger zone, along with bird species that would initiate such a command to shut the turbine down. What they sought to ensure, according to Von Der Heyden and Logan, was that species of conservation concern were effectively protected through the implementation of tailored, fit-for-purpose mitigation measures – whether technological, operational or human-led across all their wind farm operations. 'This represents a huge leap forward over the current traditional, manually operated methods,' said Red Rocket CEO Matteo Brambilla in a media release. Bioseco's commercial manager, Magda Bielawska, echoed the sentiment: 'Our mission is not only to protect birds, but to enhance wind-energy production through intelligent environmental integration.' Why bird collisions matter Wind energy's rapid expansion in South Africa – driven by the REIPPPP – has brought both environmental benefits and new challenges. While wind farms help reduce fossil fuel dependence and curb greenhouse gas emissions, they can also pose significant risks to bird populations. A 2017 report by BirdLife South Africa, reviewing the first operational wind farms under REIPPPP, found that diurnal raptors accounted for 36% of recorded fatalities, with songbirds making up 26%. Notably, threatened species such as the blue crane, Verreaux's eagle, martial eagle and black harrier were among those killed by turbine collisions. The mean fatality rate was estimated at 4.1 birds per turbine per year, placing South Africa within the range observed in North America and Europe, but with particular concern for local species that may be more vulnerable due to their limited ranges or conservation status. The report's authors stressed that, while the data were preliminary and based on a limited number of sites and years, a precautionary approach was warranted: 'The best mitigation technique is clearly the avoidance of any fatalities, however, this is not always possible and the importance of continuous monitoring during operation is therefore of utmost importance.' Bird collisions at wind farms in SA Daily Maverick previously reported that birds from at least 200 species have had fatal collisions with wind turbines in South Africa, and that almost every wind farm in the country has recorded fatalities of threatened and priority species. In earlier rounds of renewable energy development under the REIPPPP, avian protection relied primarily on manual observation and/or human-led shutdown-on-demand protocols. Von Der Heyden and Logan said these methods remained a valuable tool in a broader mitigation strategy and continue to be used where appropriate at their wind farms. But they said that the industry had evolved significantly, as had scientific understanding, regulatory guidance and stakeholder expectations. 'The deployment of the Bioseco system is not intended to replace traditional methods, but to complement them – enhancing real-time responsiveness and contributing valuable data to support long-term monitoring outcomes,' they said. The teams assess each project individually to determine the most appropriate combination of mitigation measures based on the species present, site conditions and the best available science. BirdLife South Africa (BLSA) has been looking at an estimated rate of around 3-4 birds killed per turbine per year (across all species) with more than 1,400 turbines operating in 2023. According to BLSA, one wind farm reported almost 50 birds killed per turbine per year, mostly swifts (ie not threatened). Against this backdrop, BLSA welcomed the implementation of shutdown on demand at wind farms and believed most facilities in South Africa should adopt this strategy, either using technology or observers. Samantha Ralston-Paton, the birds and renewable energy project manager at BLSA, said this was an important tool to help address bird collisions. BLSA will soon publish a handbook on Shutdown on Demand (both technology-led and observer-led) to help developers, bird specialists and decision-makers implement shutdown on demand effectively. 'Not a silver bullet' But, Ralston-Paton warned, shutdown on demand was not a silver bullet. 'It should never replace careful site selection and avoidance of areas where there is a high risk of bird collisions (eg near eagle nests),' she said. The effectiveness of technology-led shutdown on demand will be influenced by the technology used, site, and species — ie the topography, number and location of devices installed, size of the target species and detection range. Red Rocket acknowledged that the technology was not a comprehensive answer, but said that it performed a mitigation and monitoring function that superseded humans' capabilities and was not as weather dependent as human-based monitoring. 'This technology is promising for the ecological benefit of bird species that live in and around wind turbine facilities,' Von Der Heyden and Logan said. Being the first technology in South Africa used solely for mitigating bird strikes, they said the technology would be monitored by independent bird specialists and the Red Rocket Team. Previously, Ralston-Paton said that when it came to birds, the issue was not so much the impact of individual wind farms, but the cumulative effect of multiple wind farms, added to existing pressures on many bird species. She used the example of the black harrier, which is classified as endangered. The actual number of black harriers lost thus far may not seem huge, but increasing the fatality rate by just 3-5 birds a year would accelerate its path to extinction, Ralston-Paton said. 'The population is already really small, with around 1,200 mature individuals,' she said. The South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) says the proliferation of wind farms in the core black harrier breeding areas of the Western Cape coast to the Northern Cape, as well as in the newly discovered summer range in Lesotho, meant that harriers may be affected at both ends of their migratory cycle. They said that this was an unknown threat, but that the species was high on the collision-sensitivity list of the Birds and Wind Energy Specialist Group. 'It is important to keep in mind that without mitigation, impacts could be ongoing for the 20-year lifespan of a wind farm, and we have plans to increase the number of turbines in SA (and therefore risk to birds) significantly over the next 10 years,' Ralston-Paton said. Von Der Heyden and Logan said that they recognised that the bird species most at risk of turbine collisions were typically long-lived, slow to reproduce and wide-ranging. This meant that even a small number of fatalities could have significant population-level impacts, as mentioned by BLSA. To address this, they apply a multi-layered mitigation approach that includes meticulous turbine micro-siting, advanced bird tracking technologies and adaptive shutdown-on-demand protocols that respond in real time to site-specific and seasonal conditions. 'These efforts are complemented by transparent data sharing and the appointment of independent avifaunal specialists to provide ongoing oversight,' Von Der Heyden and Logan said. As for what Red Rocket learnt from this deployment, Von Der Heyden and Logan said they found that the automation system reduced downtime while improving protection. 'Manual spotters often shut down turbines for up to a 10-minute block. The camera-based, per turbine approach at Brandvalley and Rietkloof should see a reduction in unnecessary stops while still mitigating potential bird collisions, translating into both conservation and production gains,' they said. They were calibrating the system to minimise downtime, and since it was a first in South Africa, Red Rocket said they would monitor the system soon to better understand the reduction of downtime for turbines. DM
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Edits and Co-Writes ‘Tangerine' Producer Shih-Ching Tsou's Kaleidoscopic Solo Directing Debut
Alive and brimming where most neorealist festival movies prefer the detached slow crawl that strains toward a vision of real life, Shih-Ching Tsou's solo directing debut 'Left-Handed Girl' is born from a collaboration with a longtime friend, and a filmmaker familiar to most people reading this. Sean Baker co-writes (with Tsou), produces, and edits the Taiwanese filmmaker's Cannes Critics' Week premiere after Tsou, for decades, produced Baker outings like 'Tangerine,' 'Red Rocket,' and 'The Florida Project.' A kaleidoscopic, if eventually melodramatic, portrait of a Taiwanese family returning to Taipei to set up a night market noodle shop, 'Left-Handed Girl' isn't Tsou's first at-bat as director: She co-helmed Baker's 2004 indie name-maker 'Take Out,' about a Chinese food delivery worker hustling in New York City. More from IndieWire 'Overcompensating' Review: Benito Skinner's Basic College Comedy Works Well Enough Where It Counts Logging Trucks, Swimming Pools, and Bathtubs, Oh My! We Fact-Checked Our Favorite 'Final Destination' Deaths Tsou applies the restless energy of her longtime collaborator's beloved social-realist works — portraits of men and women working against their class station to find a better living — to 'Left-Handed Girl,' which rests on the skillfully directed performance of a five-year-old girl (Nina Ye, a small child who effervescently commands the camera) in the lead. The movie, even when tracking the older daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tasi) who make up this heartwarming family trio, is always inside the tiny girls' eyes and ears, looking at the world from a place of wonderment and confusion as she tries to make sense of an adult world. The girl's grasp, though, on Mandarin and years spent living with adults and fewer children makes her already almost too mature for her own good. 'Left-Handed Girl' threatens to crash-land with a melodramatic pile-up of unearthed family secrets at a birthday banquet for the girl's grandmother, every generation engaging in histrionics that bring to life past resentments preferred to be left by all outside of Taipei and in the past. Until then, this lively feature, lensed by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao with a high-contrast, bright-lights urgency that submerges you in Taipei city life day and night, hits on a more understated, universal nerve of class conflict and the ancient traditions (including, of course, the customary misogyny) becoming less fashionable in our modern, addled times. Lens flares and twinkling glares, rooms and spaces flooded with light and color, make 'Left-Handed Girl' a visually dazzling experience, as we're swept off via moped into the streaking sights and sounds of Taipei. I-Jing (Nina Ye) arrives with her mother and older sister from rural Taiwan, back in the hometown she never knew as an even smaller child, possible economic opportunity awaiting the fractured family in the capital city. They reconnect with Shu-Fen's mother, the grandma of I-ann and I-Jing, who hasn't seen any of them for years. In Taiwanese-traditional matriarchal fashion, the grandmother starts fretting over twenty-something I-Ann's (the filmmakers found Ma on Instagram) looser way of dress. I-Jing and I-Ann's mother Shu-Fen (Tsai) is in Taipei to open up a noodle shop on rented dime — and is almost immediately behind on the payments. I-Ann, who once dreamed of university life but is now shackled to being a surrogate mother to her younger sister, is willful and rebellious. She takes up work at a betel nut stand in the same night market — betel nut being a stimulant, classifiable drug in Taiwan — that stand itself fronting as a tobacco shop, engaging in listless sexual encounters with its frontman. There are, inevitably and perhaps predictably, dire consequences here, as signaled when I-Ann has to run to the street to puke during her shift. Unexpected pregnancy is a classic melodramatic trope in any movie, one that never seems to feel less shoved in, though just hold on, because the 'Left-Handed Girl' script makes I-Ann's curveball an integral part of its story. Meanwhile, I-Jing is left to her own devices, roaming the night market and the city, especially while her mother is busy raising (and barely) the medical and funeral costs for I-Jing's father, suddenly in hospital and unable to speak or move. Again, it's a lot of melodrama thrust in at once, as if this movie couldn't just let their characters move naturally through the story world, instead throwing plot hijinks at them to make their return to Taipei all the more fraught with disaster. As if showing face in a city you used to live in, and having to start up a business there on day one, weren't hard enough. 'Left-Handed Girl' routinely returns to the cultural idea of saving and/or losing face, how so much of the Taiwanese culture here is about putting on a front where our deepest traumas and disasters are buried under the floor ever beneath us. But there's little room for the past to hide, as the apartment I-Jing and her sister and mother move into, as I-Ann observes, is 'smaller than the photo.' No one has any personal space, so how would the ghosts of the past have anywhere else to hide, either? Also making I-Jing's integration into Taipei life a challenge is her left-handedness, amid a cultural bias that prefers the right hand as much as other arbitrary decorum. Her surly grandfather warns that the left hand is 'the devil's hand,' which leads I-Jing to suspect she might be possessed by evil itself when that very left hand leads to a most unfortunate slapstick incident involving her adorable pet meerkat, perhaps her only friend in this lonely world. That very left hand also takes up casual petty shoplifting, and if you were ever a small child who casually purloined a trinket or two from a gift shop, you'll understand the frustrations Tsou and Baker mine from her bemused sudden life of petty crime. If only 'Left-Handed Girl' trusted its small-scale, intrinsic human dramas enough to avoid the film's wildly over-the-top conclusion at a birthday banquet celebrating I-Jing's grandmother. Screeching and yelling, jilted lovers, and generational disappointment flood into a finale as theatrical as a Broadway stage play despite affecting performances, wrapping up too rashly to consider how all of what just went down is about to deeply traumatize the young I-Jing for life. As much as 'Left-Handed Girl' is about the past flashflooding into the present, even while those the past keeps its hook in try to make a new life, the film is less about the future and what's next for I-Jing and her family. Tsou and Baker open a fresh window that's immediate, as cluttered as it is by superimposed panes of the before, onto the now of this core group. But the film does leave them on better ground to stand on than they started, as the most hope-filled of classic melodramas do. What's culturally touched on here will be recognizable to Taiwanese audiences, how the forward motion of daily lives is tamped down by expectations that are ancient in scope. Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, 'Left-Handed Girl' still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance: It feels more like a third or fourth film, but that's also because it basically is, Tsou having not just shadowed Baker over the years, but having been directly immersed and embedded in the process on his directorial films. The imprimatur of Baker, a lifelong supporter of rising storytellers and people on the margins, will draw audiences to this touching film, but they'll walk away with the lasting impression of Tsou's own singular perspective — one infused with color and furiously energetic detail — instead. 'Left-Handed Girl' premiered in the 2025 Cannes Critics' Week. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Le Pacte is handling sales. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Exclusive: Watch the sweet trailer for 'Everything's Going to Be Great'
There's no business like show business. Take it from Bryan Cranston, who pulls back the curtain on the life of a working actor in 'Everything's Going to Be Great' (in theaters June 20). The 'Breaking Bad' Emmy winner stars as Buddy Smart, a lifelong thespian who uproots his wife (Oscar winner Allison Janney) and sons (Jack Champion and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to New Jersey to run a regional theater. The feel-good dramedy follows Buddy as he tries to keep his family afloat while they pursue their respective dreams in a new town. The film is rounded out by an all-star cast that includes Simon Rex ('Red Rocket') and Chris Cooper ('Adaptation'). The trailer premieres exclusively at along with the first look at the movie's poster. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Audiences 'are going to recognize elements of these characters in their own life because it encompasses adventure, sorrow, joy, aspiration,' Cranston said in a statement to USA TODAY, praising screenwriter Steven Rogers' 'beautiful' script and the 'imaginative creative mind' of director Jon S. Baird. 'I couldn't be happier. I'm very proud of this movie.' For Baird, who last directed 'Tetris' in 2023, 'this film restored my faith in the creative process,' he wrote in his own statement. 'This movie, at its core, is about the importance of family. We were so lucky we found such a supportive group to help us achieve even a little bit of hope in the darkest of times.' This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Exclusive trailer: Bryan Cranston's 'Everything's Going to Be Great'
USA Today
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Exclusive: Watch the sweet trailer for 'Everything's Going to Be Great'
Exclusive: Watch the sweet trailer for 'Everything's Going to Be Great' Show Caption Hide Caption 'Everything's Going to Be Great' movie unveils first trailer: Watch Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston ("Trumbo") plays bagpipes and rocks an excellent mustache in the first trailer for "Everything's Going to Be Great." There's no business like show business. Take it from Bryan Cranston, who pulls back the curtain on the life of a working actor in 'Everything's Going to Be Great' (in theaters June 20). The 'Breaking Bad' Emmy winner stars as Buddy Smart, a lifelong thespian who uproots his wife (Oscar winner Allison Janney) and sons (Jack Champion and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to New Jersey to run a regional theater. The feel-good dramedy follows Buddy as he tries to keep his family afloat while they pursue their respective dreams in a new town. The film is rounded out by an all-star cast that includes Simon Rex ('Red Rocket') and Chris Cooper ('Adaptation'). The trailer premieres exclusively at along with the first look at the movie's poster. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Audiences 'are going to recognize elements of these characters in their own life because it encompasses adventure, sorrow, joy, aspiration,' Cranston said in a statement to USA TODAY, praising screenwriter Steven Rogers' 'beautiful' script and the 'imaginative creative mind' of director Jon S. Baird. 'I couldn't be happier. I'm very proud of this movie.' For Baird, who last directed 'Tetris' in 2023, 'this film restored my faith in the creative process,' he wrote in his own statement. 'This movie, at its core, is about the importance of family. We were so lucky we found such a supportive group to help us achieve even a little bit of hope in the darkest of times.'
