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Sanity has finally returned to government, which has announced that South Africa will only need nuclear power to come on stream by 2037. The headlong rush to nuclear has been dangerous for the South African economy and has been widely criticised as an economically unwise path to follow because high build costs are locked in while renewable energy becomes more and more efficient.
This from Business Day's story:
The government published on Tuesday long-awaited energy planning documents that pushed the nuclear procurement programme back by 15 years, suggesting that new nuclear power would only be needed on stream by 2037.
But despite the delay, Eskom said that it would go ahead and issue a tender for the construction of new nuclear power stations by December as it still remained possible, under some scenarios, that nuclear power would be required by 2025. With a 10-year lead time, this would require it to start building.
You would think that the nuclear lobby would finally accept that it has lost the argument.
But not Eskom. It wants to go ahead with its call for tenders with unseemly haste. Assuming a ten year build time, the nuclear plants would only have to start being built in 2027.
And Eskom is gaming the system, claiming it can't distribute more renewable energy despite this being the lowest cost supply option, because of grid constraints. Instead of dealing with these "grid constraints" it is keeping them in place and using them as lever to rush into requesting tenders for the nuclear build.
Someone needs to take Eskom by the shoulders and do some straight talking.
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