The final decommissioning of Komati power station in Mpumalanga in 2022, which Eskom has admitted was not properly planned and executed, is a major source of worry for communities in this province that will be affected by similar shutdowns of coal-fired power plants in the future.
On Monday the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), which in 2023 published a report on the lessons learnt from the Komati shutdown, hosted a workshop with community and business leaders in Ermelo, Mpumalanga, on just transition implementation initiatives in the province.
According to the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan the coal fleet closure will directly affect about 90,000 coal workers in the mines and power plants of Mpumalanga where the sector is concentrated.
The PCC presented some of the options to create jobs and grow the province’s economy as part of the just transition — including establishing a hemp farming and processing industry.
However, several community members who attended the workshop on Monday said they were sceptical about these plans and that they feared further job losses from power plant and coal mine closures.
A representative from the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc) said they did not want any coal-fired power stations or coal mines to be shut down, instead old power stations “should be fixed”.
“What happened at Komati must never happen again,” he said.
The decision to close Komati, which was reaching the end of its 60-year operating life, was taken in 2017. Some of the generating units at the station, which was built with 1,000MW of generation capacity, were already shut down in 2018 and by 2022, when the final unit was turned off, Komati was contributing only 120MW to the grid.
As the station reached the end of its operating life major failures were making it very expensive to keep the station going.
The World Bank, at the request of the government, is the main funder for the $497m Komati shutdown project, which includes funding for renewable energy projects to be developed at the site and $47.5m for socioeconomic development for local communities and workers.
According to the World Bank, without a complete overhaul and huge investments to replace generators and related equipment the Komati power plant cannot be brought back to life.
When the station was shut down it had fewer than 200 permanent employees and Eskom has previously said that no permanent jobs were lost when Komati was shut down, though some contractors were affected.
As the PCC found in its report, the shutdown also affected the livelihoods of those in the community who indirectly relied on Komati by, for example, selling food or providing accommodation to power plant workers.
One of the key findings was that the process to create new opportunities through repowering (such as installing renewable energy capacity) and repurposing (using the land and infrastructure around the power station to start new projects such as skills training or, in the case of Komati, a manufacturing business for mobile microgrids) started too late.
“Communities and workers should be informed of the closure years ahead of time — as they are mapped out in the Integrated Resource Plan — and then Eskom and local and provincial governments must develop economic diversification plans for the surrounding district and region, with the involvement of workers and community members,” the PCC report said.
Eskom has already delayed the decommissioning schedule for plants such as Camden and Grootvlei and according to the revised shutdown plan published as part of the draft Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) 2023, decommissioning will also be somewhat delayed at stations such as Hendrina and Kriel.
However, even under the revised shutdown plan in the IRP 2023, six power stations in Mpumalanga (Arnot, Camden, Grootvlei, Hendrina, Kriel and Tutuka) are scheduled to be fully decommissioned by the end of 2030.
This highlights the urgent need to start planning for the decommissioning of the plants and to introduce new economic opportunities in Mpumalanga.
Devan Pillay, head of employment strategy at the PCC, said as ageing power stations are shut down, and SA and other countries shift from fossil fuel to renewables for energy generation, this would inevitably lead to a decline in local and global demand for coal.
“This will have an impact for the Mpumalanga coal belt,” he said.
After reviewing several options, the PCC has narrowed its focus to six opportunities that hold the best potential to create new jobs by 2030.
These are the timber value chain, which can be expanded in Mpumalanga to create an additional 17,000 jobs; increasing citrus production in the province (8,000 jobs); establishing a hemp farming and processing industry to use the product in industrial applications (24,000 jobs); the production of sustainable aviation fuel (25,000 jobs); investment in agrivoltaics — which combines solar photovoltaic energy generation with farming — (5,400 jobs); and developing businesses offering global services such as outsourcing (5,000 jobs).
Out of these opportunities four will be selected for pilot programmes based on further consultations to be undertaken by the PCC in the coming months.
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