NEWS
Solar and wind energy could
set South Africa on track for the
world’s cheapest electricity
Reprinted From: http://bit.ly/2KurjRg
Dom Wills
I
t’s a no-brainer — a move to renewable
energy will not only boost the economy
and create jobs, it is also the path to pro-
viding South Africa with potentially the
cheapest electricity in the world given our
natural wind and solar resources.
Energy was never this difficult. Energy came
from coal in the ground, burnt somewhere,
put in a turbine, wires were connected,
and cheap energy flowed for many years.
However, this was never going to last long,
because the amount of coal that forms in a
year was being burnt in a minute. The world
has now realised that this is unsustainable
behaviour, and we’re faced with a set of
future alternatives: hydro, nuclear, wind,
solar, biomass, coal — each with a sidecar
of complexity, and we need to make some
decisions.
Ten years ago, the general public didn’t know
what a kilowatt-hour (kWh) was, what it cost,
where it came from; they didn’t know how
many litres of water were spent in a flush or
shower, how many dams we had or how many
megalitres we use per day.
That’s changed. We’re more knowledgeable
now. Why? Because we’ve felt the effects.
Electricity is expensive and we’ve even run
out of it (many times). We’ve been on wa-
ter restrictions for years, and Cape Town
came close to being the first major city in
the world to run out. Authorities are having
to find alternative methods to abstract wa-
ter, domestically and regionally. Unemploy-
ment is a major contributor to poverty and
addiction, and we witness frequent protests
against injustice.
Knowledge, however, can help us to solve
problems. If the problem at hand is to solve
the electricity crisis, we need deep under-
standing to find the least cost kWh and
invest in the technologies that will deliver
that. The “least cost” does not only refer to
the financial cost, but also the environmen-
tal and social cost. The industry has been
poor at recognising the entrenchment of
communities reliant on the electricity sector
and ensuring that reform is done fairly.
In the long wait for the IRP 2019 to be ga-
zetted, many people have missed a recent
study published in the international journal,
ScienceDirect, which took a bold step for-
Grassroots
Vol 19
No 4
ward in modelling a best electricity policy
scenario based on cost, water and employ-
ment. The strength of this peer-reviewed
article is that it is founded on solid scientific
data. And while a cold approach to kWhs
might not reflect every sensitivity in our
country, the study did pay attention to the
largest social item on our agenda: jobs.
The paper, titled Pathway towards achiev-
ing 100% renewable electricity by 2050 for
South Africa, modelled the costs of renew-
able and non-renewable electricity genera-
tion pathways in South Africa, taking into
consideration South Africa’s current energy
requirements, the expected population
growth, and costs of electricity. The paper
highlighted the possible scenarios for South
Africa’s electricity future — whether we stay
on the Current Policy Scenario, highly reli-
ant on coal — or go aggressively into re-
newable energy (what the authors term the
“Best Policy Scenario”).
Their suggested “Best Policy Scenario”
(BPS) includes 71% of overall electricity pro-
duction coming from solar PV and 22% by
wind by 2050. In addition to this, storage
technologies, transmission grids and gas
power plants would be utilised to provide
the elements of consistency for a stable
electricity supply.
The BPS is 25% cheaper than the current
policy scenario, and this doesn’t take into
account the additional benefits of electric-
ity being virtually 100% renewable, such as
the reduction in the detrimental effects of
carbon and other poisonous gases in Earth’s
atmosphere, the distributed nature of the
employment, and the lower risk in the tech-
nologies.
If you put a cost saving to these benefits,
particularly the greenhouse gas emissions,
then the 100% renewables case becomes
more than 50% cheaper than the Current
Policy Scenario. In addition, the cost reduc-
tions in Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE)
are not the only benefit of this pathway. In
addition to their findings on LCOE, the au-
thors assert that the low-carbon pathway will
also decrease water consumption by 87%
by 2030, and by 99% by 2050, compared to
the baseline — which would remain in the
Current Policy Scenario.
November 2019
From an employment perspective, the re-
newables-rich BPS will grow the jobs creat-
ed by the energy sector dramatically, almost
doubling to 408,000 by 2035 and tapering
off to 278,000 by 2050 as construction jobs
stabilise. In the Current Policy Scenario,
fewer jobs are created, never rising higher
than the 200,000 mark, and decreasing to
184,000 jobs in 2050.
What about coal and nuclear?
The arguments to retain a coal-heavy elec-
tricity supply are becoming thinner, par-
ticularly given the overwhelming evidence
toward coal’s contribution to greenhouse
gas emissions that cause climate change
and the fact that South Africa is one of the
world’s worst emitters of CO 2 , clocking in
just behind huge economies like China and
the US. The authors assert that coal and
nuclear should be phased out in the BPS,
adding that new investments in coal and nu-
clear could be at risk of becoming stranded
assets as more banks tend to opt out of in-
vesting in non-renewable technologies.
On nuclear energy, the authors assert that,
“results for the fully renewable end-point
scenarios indicate that there is no need for
high cost and high-risk nuclear energy in the
future South African electricity mix”.
From the study, it is clear that South Africa
has an important policy decision to make:
one that will steer its future toward low-cost,
low-carbon electricity that will create jobs
and reduce freshwater consumption. It is
an option that would be to the benefit of
all South Africans — and the world at large.
The “side” benefit is that in this scenario,
due to our significant wind and solar re-
sources, we’d probably have the cheapest
electricity in the world, adding a strong el-
ement of competitiveness to our economy,
which we’re also trying to grow. Now more
than ever, we need to do the right thing. It’s
clear as day.
Wills writes in his personal capacity, but
as the CEO of solar PV company SOLA, it
should be acknowledged that the journal in
which the study appeared was titled Solar
Energy. The scientific models used were not
biased towards solar and included various
other possible scenarios and forms of en-
ergy.
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