Drawing up SA economy roadmap
THE MINISTER of Energy Tina Joemat-Pettersson last week put out an oped clarifying certain issues in the integrated resource plan. We welcome the indications from the minister that South Africa’s carbon budget will be incorporated as a scenario. (The budget is derived from the peak-plateau-decline trajectory in the national climate change and used in formulating the country’s intended nationally determined contribution for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)
We urge that the carbon budget be recognised as the point of departure for all electricity supply mix scenarios under various conditions of demand, not just one out-of-the-ordinary scenario.
In order to meet our own national and international emission reduction imperatives, the question to be answered by an integrated resource plan is: “How do we reconfigure our energy supply over time to ensure energy security and meet various demand projections, while remaining within the carbon budget?”
In the government’s latest greenhouse gas inventory, as at 2010, points to the fact that 79 percent of South Africa’s emissions come from the energy sector, of which 55 percent comes from electricity production.
Rigorous modelling by several reputable institutions starkly shows that we will not remain within our carbon budget without clearing coal out of our electricity production, sooner rather than later.
Many of these models demonstrate that this can be done without nuclear. We need to find the least cost energy technology options both for the price of electricity and reduction of carbon emissions.
A key concern is the notion the renewable energy (RE) cannot be unconstrained. Both Germany and China are examples of countries where renewable energy were rapidly deployed. China in particular, added 35GW of wind and solar power to their grid in 2015 alone.
One cannot help wondering whether the sole reason for constraining RE is to make a tenuous case for nuclear.
It is in our view problematic that monies are being allocated to a nuclear build rather than to address the network constraints through appropriate extension of the distribution grid which will be a considerably cheaper and boost the installations of renewables.
Similarly, the introduction of storage solutions appear to be a bit of a red herring with a report from CSIR demonstrating that a combination of solar PV (6GW) and wind (16GW) is theoretically capable of supplying a yearly electricity demand of 70TW/h backed up by 8GW of flexible power, which could be natural gas, biogas, coal, pumped hydro, hydro, concentrated solar power, or demand-side interventions.
One also hopes that large metros will increase pressure on the minister to address the present designation of Eskom as the sole uptake of RE from large scale power producers.
Allowing metros to purchase directly from independent power producers will enable them to mitigate against future Eskom price increases, diversify the build programme and this will impact positively on their long term financial sustainability.
South Africa’s transition to a thriving low-carbon economy requires forward thinking about and rapid action on our electricity supply and must be decisively driven by political leadership.
In this regard, we look forward to the Integrated Energy Plan which should serve as a roadmap for diluting fossil fuels out of our overall energy sector, and thus provide the framework within which we decarbonise our electricity. SALIEM FAKIR HEAD OF POLICY AND FUTURES UNIT WORLD-WIDE FUND FOR NATURE, SA