Rhodes University gears up #RU120 anniversary year
year-long celebratory programme packed with diverse activities, including reunions, high-level societal debates, unveilings, exhibitions and cultural activities, kicks off later this month with a seminal education summit to further strengthen quality education as Makhanda’s unique selling point.
Convened under the auspices of the vice-chancellor’s education initiative championed by Professor Sizwe Mabizela, the multi-stakeholder summit is the first of its kind in the country. Never before has there been an event convened by a vice-chancellor with the kind of city-centric vision such as the one at the heart of this summit’s agenda.
Rhodes University’s120thanniversary project in 2024, or RU120, as it has come to be known, was launched by Mabizela early in 2023.
The project is designed to advance a vision to deepen the unity of purpose among the university’s diverse and multigenerational alumni, connect scholarly exploits from Sir George Cory to the present distinguished Professor Tebello Nyokong and Professor Justin Jonas era, and reimagine Rhodes University in a fastchanging global economy.
“The 2024 anniversary year presents opportunities for all stakeholders to unite behind a singular resolve to pursue growth and sustainability, reinvigorate our mutual connections for deeper collaboration and draw from our collective energies to reimagine a new future for our institution and its purposes,” Mabizela said.
“It also offers much excitement, such as the prospect of having Abdullah Ibrahim headlining our cultural programme.”
The RU120 events calendar includes academic and research showcases such as the initiation of the internet in SA in 1991, a game-changing project in which
Aproject sponsor for RU120, Professor Peter Clayton, was involved, community engagement accomplishments that saw the university win the global MacJannet Citizen Prize and launch the Community Engagement journal.
Key challenges include financial sustainability, the socioeconomic state of SA, the Eastern Cape and Makhanda in particular, and funding for higher education.
The ever-spiralling historical student debt currently hovering above R17bn, inequality, corruption, and poor education outcomes feature among these.
Highlights on the RU120 programme include:
● Vice-chancellors from different Eastern Cape universities in dialogue addressing pressing social, economic, political, and ethical concerns.
● High-level current affairs reflections and debates, starting with Doha debates between Rhodes University students.
● A journalism summit to explore journalism's role in today’s world as the cornerstone of democracy and human advancement.
● High-level political, community and business leaders are scheduled to contribute to discussions about the future of SA.
In the year's second quarter, emeritus history professor, accomplished author and the university’s longest-serving orator, Paul Maylam, explores Rhodes’ intellectual history.
After that, the grand opening of the R90m Institute for Nanotechnology Innovation building will take place.
An orchestral ensemble comprising the Nelson Mandela University Orchestra, the Rhodes University Orchestra, and the Makhanda Community Orchestra will forge a memorable auditory backdrop for the year.
For more information on everything RU120-related, please visit the regularly updated official RU120 website.
SA experienced unprecedented electricity shortages in 2023 as ageing coal plants became increasingly prone to breakdowns.
The country urgently needs to develop new electricity generation facilities and reduce reliance on coal power.
In the first week of 2024, energy minister, Gwede Mantashe released a proposed roadmap for the future of electricity in SA. Unfortunately, the draft integrated resource plan is a major disappointment.
Described by some analysts as “shoddy”, the plan contains, among many flaws, huge errors in costing the different future energy scenarios.
Firstly, the plan’s costing estimates aren’t credible. It does not even consider the most inexpensive combination of new, additional electricity — largely wind and photovoltaic solar, with some battery storage.
Instead, the plan claims wrongly that gas-intensive scenarios are cheaper.
Secondly, the plan says the government must build 6,000MW of new gas-fired power stations by 2030.
This idea has been vigorously opposed by environmental and other civil society groups on the grounds that increased use of fossil fuels would accelerate global warming. Another problem is that the gas would have to be imported, leaving SA at the mercy of international gas price fluctuations.
The kind of investment in gas that is needed would require major new builds, which invariably end up with major delays and cost overruns.
The new draft plan could commit SA to unnecessarily expensive solutions. This will damage economic prospects and drive energy costs to unaffordable levels.
The first scenario is a “reference case”, which proposes that all additional electricity be generated half by gas and half by wind and solar power. The draft plan wrongly claims that this is the most costeffective option.
The second is a “renewable energy” scenario, where no new coal, nuclear and gas plants are built, but where only about one third of the new solar power investment would be in the form of photovoltaic technology.
This scenario says the bulk of new solar capacity would be provided by concentrated solar power, which is rarely considered globally these days because it is much more expensive than photovoltaic technology. Concentrated solar power previously had the advantage of being able to store heat for a few hours, generating electricity after sunset.
But this can now be achieved with photovoltaic technology and battery storage.
The third scenario is “renewable plus nuclear”, where about 15,000MW of new nuclear builds would provide the electricity attributed to concentrated solar power under the previous all-renewable scenario.
The fourth is a “delayed shutdown” scenario. Under this plan, the life of the country’s coal plants would be extended by several years each, long beyond the projected closure dates for these plants.
The final option proposed by the government is a “renewable plus coal” scenario, where new gas and coal plants would replace the capacity attributed to concentrated solar power or nuclear in the other scenarios.
Strangely, there is no provision for what is probably the most cost-effective option: a renewable energy scenario using photovoltaic technology and with increased storage.
We do not know how the government costed these scenarios because the draft plan does not set out the costs per technology.
Instead, it claims to have used the April 2023 Lazard Levellised Costs of Energy report to calculate how much each new form of energy would cost.
But this doesn’t appear to have been the case. Lazard is the world’s largest independent investment bank. Its reports are widely recognised as authoritative.
The costs Lazard has calculated for the various technologies — renewable, coal, gas and nuclear power — are very different to the costs that the government must have used in the draft plan.
If the ministry’s planners had used the Lazard energy costing, they would have reached a very different conclusion. There are three possible explanations: that the planners didn’t use the Lazard costing, they used it incorrectly, or their cost calculations are wrong.
Lazard sets out these costs per megawatt hour of electricity:
● Utility scale solar photovoltaic: US$24-96 (R453R1,815) per MWh.
● Utility scale solar photovoltaic plus storage: US$46-102 (R870R1,928) per MWh.
● Onshore wind: US$24-75 (R453-R1,418) per MWh.
● Coal: US$68-166 (R1,285R3,138) per MWh for coal from a newly built coal plant and US$29-74 (R548-R1,400) per MWh from an existing plant.
● Nuclear: US$141-221 (R2,665-R4,178) per MWh for new build; US$29-34 (R548R642) per MWh for existing plant.
Lazard last produced costs for concentrated solar power in 2019: US$141 (R2,665) per MWh, which is exactly the lowcost end of nuclear. However, concentrated solar power is no longer updated in the Lazard report as almost all solar plants developed in the last few years are photovoltaic.
There is therefore no way that the “renewable plus nuclear” scenario can work out cheaper than the one for renewables only.
These costs clearly show that wind and solar power are the cheapest options. SA has extraordinarily high sunshine levels and good winds, which would bring the costs for solar and wind power down to near the lowest levels in the earlier quoted ranges. It is therefore inexplicable that the ministry’s team has concluded that the “renewable energy” scenario is by far the most expensive.
A good electricity plan is key to ensuring a country’s energy security. It is imperative that the exact assumptions made in the modelling must be declared and that government must make the calculations clear. — Hartmut Winkler is professor of physics, University of Johannesburg. This article is republished from theconversation.com