The Sunday Mail
South Africa’s draft integrated resource plan, the blueprint for the country’s electricity mix, has been “stuck” in Nedlac discussions for months because of deep ideological differences that experts say are preventing parties from reaching agreement on the final version.
Some energy experts say the fear of job losses in the coal sector is at the root of the lack of consensus to a plan that moves away from a dominance of coal to more renewables and gas, and say unless government can lead the way by showing how this transition will be managed to minimise job losses, it will go nowhere.
Others suggest the hold-up may be deliberate from those sectors to whose advantage it is to maintain the status quo of an “unbundled” Eskom and the dominance of coal power.
What they agree on is that if South Africa remains stuck in a coal economy while the rest of the world is moving away from it, we will be left behind, grinding on until eventually it becomes too expensive to extract coal and those jobs will disappear anyway — but the overall losses to South Africa would be far greater than if the transition had been managed.
Jesse Burton of UCT’s Energy Research Centre said the move to a low carbon economy was underway globally and was inevitable. Managed properly locally, it could be harnessed to be a major job creator and new development path.
However, Burton said it was legitimate for coal workers to oppose the IRP if they saw it as something that threatened their jobs in the move away from coal to increased renewables.
Currently coal provides around 90 percent of electricity and renewables 4,8 percent.
The draft IRP’s envisaged electricity mix by 2030 will be 46 percent coal, 25 percent renewables, 16 percent gas, 6 percent hydro, 4 percent pumped storage plus the 2.5 percent nuclear power from Koeberg.
Burton said government needed to develop a clear and workable plan on how the move to a low carbon economy would be implemented on the ground.
“We need the ‘how’ spelled out. It is not enough to say that renewable energy creates more jobs. We need to see plans to put renewable energy in the areas in Mpumalanga where coal is now. It is very clear that government has not created the conditions for workers to see that,” Burton said.
The scale of what the low carbon economy could develop into, if implemented properly, was huge.
The draft IRP was released at the end of August. The public was given until the end of October to comment on it before it went to Nedlac. Former Energy Minister Jeff Radebe initially said it would be finalised before the end of 2018 and later he said by the end of February.
Thomas Garner, chair of the SA Independent Power Producers’ Association, said the private sector, which had so far invested R200bn in South Africa’s renewable energy industry, would not wait forever while parties were locked in an “ideological debate” over the IRP, but would invest in other countries where governments offered certainty.
There had been no movement in the South African renewables sector for years, he said, apart from Ramaphosa and Radebe last year forcing Eskom to sign the agreements made in 2016 between government and 27 independent power producers, which Eskom had unlawfully refused to do.
“That was completing a stalled process, not bringing in more renewables. Since then, there has been zilch. Investors won’t wait around forever.”
Asked to comment, Nedlac said it was unable to say when the IRP process would be completed as that was up to the sectors within the Nedlac organisation. — Fin24.
