Glaring energy omissions
Once again, Business Day gives “independent economic consultant” Rob Jeffrey space to bang the coal and nuclear drum and, once again, he does so with half-truths, glaring omissions and outright lies (Nuclear and coal cheaper and more reliable than renewables, January 25).
He claims that the German Energiewende policy has been “a complete failure” and that Germany has put a cap on wind development projects. The truth, as reported by Reuters, is that the cut is a temporary response to there not being sufficient high-voltage power lines to carry green energy from the windy north to the industrial south. Once this is addressed, from 2026, new wind power projects will resume at a rate of 840MW annually to meet Germany’s 15GW wind capacity goal in 2030.
Another claim, that solar and wind electricity is “not dispatchable”, ignores the Bokpoort facility in the Northern Cape running successfully since December 2015. Built in just two years, the Bokpoort Concentrated Solar Power plant utilises a thermal storage system which can release energy for up to nine hours and 20 minutes after the sun goes down.
While Jeffrey bemoans the loss of mining jobs (which could amount to 150,000 apparently, though no studies are cited), he makes no mention of the jobs that will be generated by the move to renewables, or the fact that these jobs will create skills and drive technical expertise. Surely better than dirty, dangerous, health-destroying coal-mining jobs?
And nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in his article, is any reference made to climate change or the externalised costs we all must bear when we rely on coal and nuclear; for Jeffrey, there is only the cold logic of the current dollar price per kilowatt hour (cheaper every year with renewables). The cost of the hospitalised asthmatic child living near the coal-fired power station is not mentioned here, nor the black-lung miner on his deathbed.
What price the droughts and floods and the failed crops brought about by man-made climate change? These, apparently, do not exist.
I could go on, but there is no need. Jeffrey himself makes the most devastating critique of his own dinosaurish position when he tells us: “US President Donald Trump has clearly indicated that he favours increasing the use of fossil fuels, including coal.”
Enough said.
Simon Rhoades
Vredehoek