Ramaphosa’s nuclear conundrum
For the past 14 years, South Africa has been stuck with an electricity deficit that was foreseen a decade before the lights started flickering as rains in the Mpumalanga coalfields caused some of the 12 power stations to lose their fuel source in December 2007.
Ironically, that was the month the ANC would oust the president, Thabo Mbeki, whose administration had fumbled the ball in planning the country’s electricity expansion.
His successor in Jacob Zuma would oversee a disastrous build of two coalfired power stations in Medupi and Kusile in the final years of his presidency; the power stations are still not quite complete and feed into our ongoing load-shedding crisis.
Apart from the corruption and wastage of hundreds of billions of rand the project would unleash, the former president would launch an all-out assault on the treasury to ensure a trillion-rand nuclear build with his preferred bidder, the Russian-owned Rosatom.
Given that our economy has failed to breach the 2% growth mark since 2013, we certainly dodged an expensive bill that would now be proving debilitating. Our fiscal state is precarious at best and, unfortunately, we are sitting with a sub-investment grade or “junk” status, which means our borrowing costs are punitive.
That is the tale of the more than a decade since the issue of growing electricity provision and the need to expand the shift away from dependence on coal has been on the table.
Although more renewable energy has been introduced, we still face the question of how to ensure an energy secure future and avoid falling into a situation like that of the biggest economy on the continent, Nigeria, which suffers regular outages.
We have about 4600MW of renewable power, but it’s not always available because of adverse weather factors. Without a secure energy grid, we won’t be able to attract the sort of investment that would begin to eat into our structurally high unemployment rate. Statistics South Africa releases the second-quarter jobless data soon, a timely reminder of the depth of the crisis.
At this point, we can’t fathom extending the life of old and aging coal-fired power stations that currently power the grid; the build of Medupi and Kusile must be the last. World trade is set to become more punitive for countries such as South Africa because of our high emissions caused by coal.
What energy mix will make up for the loss of that coal power? Will renewables alone fill the gap, or in a combination with our existing nuclear power plant, together with gas? Or is a nuclear build in the investment-starved Eastern Cape the only way to ensure a secure power grid?
We ask that question in this week’s Mail & Guardian. It’s a political question as much as anything: Does President Cyril Ramaphosa have the answer to our energy needs his predecessors quite clearly did not?