What to do about pollution-spewing Eskom
PRESIDENT Ramaphosa surprised the nation on June 12, 2021, when he lifted the threshold for selfgeneration of electricity to 100MW. It took some real twisting of Gwede Mantashe’s arm to do that. Now that it has happened, we can assess the importance of the announcement.
Firstly, Eskom in many of its power plants has been flouting environmental laws. Its ageing coalpowered stations are spewing carbon and pollutants into the air.
With COP26 scheduled to discuss massive carbon reduction at its meeting in Glasgow in November this year, South Africa will need to shift power generation to renewable sources very rapidly to protect our exports of minerals, cars and agricultural products.
Secondly, De Ruyter believes that it will cost Eskom R60 billion over 10 years to make its power fleet environmentally compliant.
He admits, “This is money which we frankly just don’t have.” Indeed, that is the case. It will be cheaper to decommission these plants and look for ways to repurpose them.
As Eskom accounts for about 42% of the nation’s total greenhouse gases, the utility recently published an expression of interest for proposals, focusing on its Komati, Grootvlei and Camden coal-fired plants being repurposed.
So what are the possibilities of doing something new with Eskom’s ageing and polluting powergeneration fleet?
In a discussion with a family friend, Clive Mallinson, an idea was explored for municipalities to consider singly or in a group buying Komati, Grootvlei and Camden to shut down the furnaces and use the existing infrastructure to generate and buy renewable energy and wheel it via the national grid to the cities in the consortium.
This is not wishful thinking. Universities in Australia are generating a lot of renewable energy. The University of Wollongong’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre in Australia, for example, has a 150kW solar power system “generating an estimated 197MWh of clean electricity a year and saving the university approximately $31 300 (R336 000) annually”.
A 100kW installation on Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne is delivering approximately 124.8 megawatt hours of clean electricity annually. Additionally, the system is offsetting 105 tons of carbon emissions per annum. Other Australian institutions are also rolling out solar projects.
As Australian universities are world leaders in photovoltaics and quantum computing, it is not surprising that they are tapping into solar energy this way.
With plenty of reliable energy the cities in the consortium buying up old power stations could pioneer sustainable housing and affordable smart transport to get even more carbon credits.
These cities could also use the energy to accelerate their move to achieving a circular economy. Once again, there will be carbon credits to sweeten this endeavour.
The advantages don’t end there. The production of yellow hydrogen at scale becomes a real possibility and the benefits of that will be vast.
Voters in the local government elections must keep this issue in mind and vote cleverly if they wish to score in many big ways.
FAROUK CASSIM | Cope