It is surely no coincidence that just as the new Integrated Resource Plan that will set out projections for SA’s long-term energy demand and determine the energy mix is nearing completion, Eskom has stepped up its public campaign against renewable energy and in favour of nuclear.
The IRP 2010, which should be updated every two years, is four years out of date having got snarled up in SA’s toxic energy politics. The reason for the delay has been the obsession at the top levels of government with pulling off a mega nuclear deal.
An updated iteration of the IRP that is an exercise undertaken by expert modellers, made a brief appearance on the internet in December 2013, before vanishing from the public eye.
The likely reason was that it pushed the case for nuclear energy out from 2023 to sometime between 2025 and 2035. It was not adopted by the Cabinet and never became policy. Instead, the government planned for nuclear energy on the basis of the outdated plan. But as time has passed and a court challenge has been launched by antinuclear lobbyists, it has become clear the government needs an updated IRP if it wants a nuclear programme. This is, of course, aside from the basic and rational reasons for needing an IRP that is to update demand estimates and technology costs and on those assumptions to plan for future energy-generation.
And so, earlier this year, the modellers were again called into action to develop a new plan. Once again, it has run into problems. This time, due to much lower than anticipated demand — a result of low economic growth but also because of energy-saving initiatives — demand projections are lower than before. And the relative costs of technology have changed drastically with renewable energy — wind and solar photovoltaic — now the cheapest.
The new IRP has been stuck in the works since the beginning of 2016. But as industry experts and stakeholders are beginning to lose patience, word has got out about the shape of things to come. For nuclear energy, the case is even weaker than before with none needed until at least 2032 if not 2040.
And this is only if the growth of renewable energy is capped. The argument of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research — that baseload capacity can be created by using renewable energy along with gas-fired turbines to smooth out the troughs – has also found some favour.
It is no surprise then that Eskom’s head of generation and its front man in the campaign for nuclear energy, Matshela Koko, has upped his rate of writing opinion pieces for newspapers.
He also argues that the nuclear procurement should be done before the publication of the IRP, so that real prices can be used, not estimates. In one of his latest articles, he argues that the first two nuclear reactors should be built and put into commission by 2026 "in order to mitigate against the projection of baseload capacity running out between 2026 and 2028".
This claim is not borne out by the new IRP, which Koko says he has not seen. But if that is the case, it would be best for Eskom to wait for it to emerge for public consultation, which Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson has promised is imminent.
A public relations offensive by Eskom, in which a series of numbers that cannot be easily verified or checked, are thrown out to claim that renewable energy costs are killing Eskom and harming consumers is no substitute for a public discussion on a model proposed by experts using verifiable data.
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