Are we in it yet? The just transition? If we are, how would you know? The just transition is supposed to be a strategy to manage SA’s passage from coal-fired electricity to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 so the 80,000 people employed in coal burning are not disadvantaged.
For the moment, the strategy exists in politics only. ANC leaders like mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe rail against proponents of renewable energy because they fear wind and solar power will leave coal jobs behind. And he’s right. The whole point of renewables is to build a new and more resilient economy.
But as Eskom dumps stage 4 load-shedding on us you have to ask what climate justice really looks like. It’s buying diesel, backfilling hydro storage and fixing boilers. It’s how we live now. Do we slow down the transition from coal to net-zero carbon and endure this for decades, or do we speed it up and settle the country as early as possible?
Take this week. Eskom’s total generation capacity is about 45,000MW. Of that, some 34,000MW is “base load”, or coal-fired. Of that, on Wednesday more than 15,000MW was broken down and more than 5,000MW was out for maintenance. So much for the reliable base load the anti-renewables lobby fights for.
No country can live with this insecurity. Even Mantashe recognises that. But, along with a strong lobby from business, he and his own party and large parts of the opposition have fallen in love with gas. The government’s overarching energy policy, the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) of 2019, sees just 3,000MW of new gas capacity installed between now and 2030, and talks of converting the 20 diesel-fired gas generators Eskom uses when its coal plant falls over, to gas after that.
The National Business Initiative, stuffed with CEOs from across the economy, has just published a weighty push for gas as a transitionary fuel, arguing that liquefied natural gas (LNG) could be supplied by sea in bulk carriers to Richards Bay, Coega and Saldanha, and that the inexpensive assets created in the transition would not be “stranded” once renewables become the dominant source of our energy.
But Sasol is a major voice in the National Business Initiative, and not only is that proposition already a long leap ahead of the IRP but Mantashe, in his conviction, takes it even further. He is still determined to rescue the Karpowership deal, in which he would create infrastructure for floating Turkish power stations to dock in our ports and supply gas-fired electricity into our grid for the next 20 years. Thus far the Turkish bid has not withstood court action, but the threat of the ships has not yet gone away.
Even determined environmentalists agree the gas option is not unreasonable. Not only would Eskom’s diesel generators be converted to run on LNG, but small power plants close to where ships might offload gas would also not be that expensive. I get that. Gas and other fossil fuels are tangible. Put a match to them and they burn. The sun and wind are different. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
But as we can see now, Russia has invaded Ukraine and invited sanctions from a nervous West, and gas prices are through the roof. Why plan a future on a commodity we don’t produce and whose price we cannot contain, when the sun and wind are ours for free? Surely we should be fighting for the fastest possible route to a free source of energy, and to speed up, rather than slow down, our arrival at energy security? Surely that’s the best we can do for people trapped in coal?
Eskom’s 20 diesel generators cost R600,000 each to run for an hour. Eskom’s diesel budget is R6bn a year, so that’s 500 hours per generator per year. There are about 730 hours in a month.
The problem is the fossils lobby cannot grasp the reality that without burning anything the lights would still come on, cars would be charged, factories could open. The price we pay for indulging its anxieties is more of the same, and of course the domestic coal mining industry is happy to encourage and fund the slowest possible route to renewables. By the time gas solves our problems it will already be obsolete.
That is because batteries already exist to store the energy generated by the sun and wind overnight. It is just a question of scale. We think they are too expensive, but lithium ion batteries now cost about 10% of what they did a decade ago, and by 2030 they will be 10% of what they are now. Billions of dollars are meanwhile being poured into the development of solid-state batteries.
As we sit in the dark these next few days the thing to ponder is why we do not, immediately, upscale our investment, effort and policy into renewables, adding batteries to the mix. The IRP calls for an extra 20,000MW of renewable by 2030, which is excellent. But the IRP doesn’t even mention batteries and 20,000MW isn’t nearly enough.
Instead, we should double that target and not bog ourselves down in fruitless debate about a transition that would make investors rich and the rest of us poorer.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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