In his recent state of the nation address President Cyril Ramaphosa included gas-generated electricity among the options available to us. This is a no-brainer. Gas is the backbone of power generation worldwide. It is only half as polluting as coal. Gas plants can be built in 18 months to three years versus eight years for coal and at least 10 years for large-scale nuclear.
Getting the power to cities and industry is no problem — gas plants can be built close to the market. There is no need for large supplies of water as gas plants do not use steam. Liquefied gas is readily available for delivery by ship but does of course require port-based storage facilities.
Global oil companies are looking to explore for gas off our shores. If we facilitate the necessary licences there is a reasonable chance of a large gas strike in the next few years. If we don’t find gas the fact remains that the cost of importing gas would be several times less than the damage caused by load-shedding.
To cap it all, our existing open-cycle diesel (similar to gas) plants have proved themselves over a decade and more. Their availability ratio is nearly double that of our ageing coal-fired plant.
Certainly, we must keep our coal power plants going as long as possible. Certainly, we must, over the next 10 to 15 years, expand our present sun and wind programmes to achieve at least 100GW of capacity, together with the necessary grid and storage facilities.
However, 5GW of gas-fired generation capacity coming on stream in the next 18 months to three years is the only realistic way to end load-shedding.
Willem Cronje,
Cape Town
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