South Africa needs to invest in building between 5,000MW and 6,000MW of renewable energy every year until at least 2030, while slowly decommissioning ageing coal-fired power plants at a reasonable pace to deal with the ongoing power crisis.
SOUTH Africa needs to invest in building between 5,000MW and 6,000MW of renewable energy every year until at least 2030, while slowly decommissioning ageing coal-fired power plants at a reasonable pace to deal with the ongoing power crisis.
These are some of the recommendations of the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), which could appear in the upcoming energy-mix policy that is being reviewed currently in the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP2019).
The PCC on Monday released two reports on South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET IP) following extensive public consultations and stakeholder engagements within the first three months of this year.
PCC executive director Dr Crispian Olver said the focus of solving the dire energy crisis should be getting as much public and private investment in renewables and battery storage into the grid.
Olver said the PCC fully supported the measures taken to scale up embedded generation and was seeing an exponential rise in investment in renewable energy, which was a positive trajectory.
“There is a confluence between the short-term crisis and the long-term requirements to decarbonise energy systems,” Olver said.
“Basically, the least cost and fastest implementation of solutions for addressing the power crisis are renewables, solar-catered battery storage, and peaking power support such as gas-fired peakers running at low utilisation.
“We need to be doing renewables at about 6-8GW per annum, that’s a significant increase from where we are, but we are starting to see that kind of scale of rollout now.
“We will be releasing recommendations on the new IRP shortly, those recommendations are going to argue that we need to get 50-60GW of renewables into the grid by 2030, and 3-5GW of peaking support,” he said.
The JET IP was released last year and sets out the government’s plans for South Africa’s priorities of investment, as the country transitions towards a low-carbon economy.
The PCC views the JET-IP as an important framework and foundation for the implementation of South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET).
However, it is not the totality of a JET plan nor an implementation plan for the broader Just Transition Framework.
Olver said the current grants allocated to South Africa totalling to $8.5 billion (R161.9bn) would not be enough to fund the JET, and everyone was united in considering these to be inadequate.
He also said the JET IP needed to be closely integrated into the government’s overall fiscal policy framework, with the PCC recommending that National Treasury undertakes a fiscal review and integrates the JET IP into the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF).
During consultations, skills development also came into sharp focus from participants.
Olver said the plan also spoke explicitly to a range of just transition interventions in skills development, economic diversification and mine rehabilitation.
A PwC report released yesterday showed that employers estimated that 44% of workers’ skills would be disrupted in the next five years, with those who did not up-skill themselves at the forefront of this disruption.
PwC Africa Workforce of the Future Platform lead Marthle du Plessis said a green workforce was needed to meet the governments’ commitments to accelerate the energy sector’s decarbonisation.
“Enabling the just transition requires your workforce to become agents of change through applying their understanding of the opportunities and risks that sustainability offers,” Du Plessis said.
“Engaging in awareness-raising and up-skilling programmes will enable people to apply their knowledge of sustainability to their everyday lives — thus being a true embodiment of your organisation’s sustainability objectives.”
In decommissioning and repurposing of Eskom’s old coal-fired power stations, Olver said there was some confusion about the notion of an “accelerated coal transition”.
Olver said the decommissioning and repurposing programme was aligned with existing policy (the IRP) and Eskom’s own decommissioning plan – driven by the technical assessment of “end-of-economic life”.
“The least cost transition way is to pull these power stations off at the end of their economic life. It’s very difficult to be advocating for decommissioning in the middle of a power crisis.
“We think moving the decommissioning of particular coal plants by a some years is neither here nor there, and it’s not going to fundamentally affect our net goals,” he said.
“What we are saying is that once we have stabilised the power crisis, the decommissioning programme should be relooked, and we should be opportunistically attempting once we have ramped up renewables to a significant degree on the grid.
“And also once we have grid stability, and we are balancing the grid with adequate power, then we can look at the opportunities to pull those plants off generation at a slightly faster pace then the end of economic life,” he said.
– BUSINESS REPORT
