Load-shedding and an electricity shortfall of about 4,000MW are among the main factors constraining economic growth and job creation in SA. Companies routinely list the unreliability of electricity supply and high energy costs as among the top constraints to doing business in the country.
The government has indicated that it will prioritise investment in the scaling up of renewable energy generation as part of its climate commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the country needs urgent solutions that will increase the supply of baseload power.
Greg Nichollas, project development manager of Lesedi Nuclear Services, which works in power generation in the mining, oil and gas industries, spoke to Business Day about some of the most viable solutions to the immediate power shortfall.
Why should SA invest in natural gas as a fuel source for its future energy mix?
What SA needs right now is new, reliable baseload power generation that will help fill the gap in electricity supply and support economic growth. The quickest way to that would be to build gas-fired power plants. I’m convinced that if we had proper gas infrastructure, supply, and distribution, where industry knew they had a reliable and secure supply of gas to their doorstep, it could revolutionise the industrial sector in SA and it would go a long way in facilitating increased economic growth in SA. It will not solve SA’s energy problems overnight, but it should be part of the solution and it will help the country to start turning things around.
SA already has access to local coal reserves and the infrastructure needed to provide coal-fired power. Why invest in gas-fired plants rather than in more coal-run power stations when these are both fossil fuels?
Coal generates about two and a half times more CO2 emissions than gas. From an environmental perspective, gas, though it does generate greenhouse gas emissions, is cleaner than coal. Gas will also be quicker to implement, and it is complementary to hybrid solutions that integrate renewable energy plants with gas plants.
How far away are we from having the type of technology that will make it possible for renewable energy from sun and wind to reliably contribute to baseload electricity supply?
I think renewable energy is still a long, long way away from providing a baseload, secure supply of electricity, 24 hours a day.
There needs to be a lot more development in the technology around storing electrical power. To store electrical power, it must be converted into another form such as pumped storage hydropower or chemical storage such as batteries. We have good renewable energy resources in SA such as wind and solar, but energy generated from these sources does vary over the year, which creates uncertainty of supply. To make a complete switch to renewables there would have to be sufficient supply and then in addition to that you must have a lot of storage capacity.
Is there not a risk of running into a situation 10 years down the line, where the world will have access to better renewable energy generation solutions that will make gas, and current investment in gas infrastructure, irrelevant?
We have seen a revolution in renewable power generation technology in the last 10 years and we will continue to see changes in this field, but I believe that for the next 10 to 20 years gas will have a substantial role to play in energy supply.
Keep in mind that one of the technologies that is generating a lot of interest now is green hydrogen gas. This will create the opportunity to supplement, and further into the future to completely replace, natural gas with green hydrogen. Pipeline and other supply infrastructure for natural gas can in future be used for the supply of green gases such as green hydrogen and biogas.
Isn’t nuclear power a better solution than gas for providing cleaner baseload energy?
Nuclear should be one of the key solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change. SA is ideally suited to a nuclear solution given that most of the power generation is in the north of the country while much of the demand is expected to come from the Cape provinces. This means that power must be distributed thousands of kilometres across the country which results in a lot of transmission losses.
It is also important to note that a third of SA’s freshwater reserves are used in power generation for the cooling of power plants and this in a country that is water scarce. If we had nuclear power scattered along the coast of SA, where the power is actually needed, we would solve the issue of transmission losses by generating power where it is required, and we can use seawater for cooling rather than freshwater cooling, freeing up scarce resources, for use in agriculture, for example.
But nuclear is not an immediate solution. It takes seven to 10 years to build a new nuclear plant.
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