Eskom doesn’t need nuclear or new coal in energy mix – experts

While Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe rolls out the long-awaited Integrated Energy Resource Plan today which will set out South Africa’s energy mix for the foreseeable future, Eskom staff would have been hard at work for hours already fixing another problem at Kusile power station.

Video footage of a coal silo being filled, allegedly silo one at Kusile, shows coal cascading down the side of the conveyer belt-fed silo after allegedly being overfilled.

It is understood the top floor of the bunker was flooded and allegedly threatened one or more of the boilers being shut down.

On Wednesday, problems with the conveyer belt at Medupi played its part in rolling blackouts.

Experts agreed independently of each other that any new coal in the IRP would be a bad idea.

“Coal is an outdated and dirty technology – the environmental and health costs of which have not been factored into electricity planning,” Robyn Hugo, head of the pollution & climate change programme at the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), had said in 2018 already.

Hugo told The Citizen yesterday the stance of the Life After Coal Campaign (consisting of CER, groundWork and Earthlife Africa) had not changed and noted it was essential the updated IRP took sufficient account of the external costs and impacts of variously available technologies.

“All credible modelling demonstrates new coal has no place in a least-cost electricity system. The two proposed coal independent power producers are not required for energy security, would add some R20 billion to a least-cost mix and enormous greenhouse gas emissions at a time when an urgent shift away from coal-fired power is essential,” Hugo said.

“At present, almost 90% of South Africa’s electricity mix is already comprised of coal, despite many of these plants failing to meet the required emission standards and causing devastating health and climate impacts.”

The CER, on behalf of groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Movement, are already litigating with the Environmental Affairs department over severe air pollution on the Mpumalanga highveld, primarily due to Eskom and Sasol’s emissions.

A number of NGOs joined hands last year when they submitted a letter to energy portfolio committee.

Some of the key issues the organisations believed the IRP should include was to provide for an urgent shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy by having no new coal capacity; no new nuclear energy, and align with other policies and legislation on climate change, electricity, energy and the Constitution.

Of course, energy expert Chris Yelland said, the final plan would only be revealed today at Mantashe’s briefing.

“We’ve listened to Minister Mantashe talk at length of the energy mix he wants. It seems to me he wants to give something to everybody,” Yelland said.

“If you hear him talk you would think there was some nuclear going to be thrown in and what he calls ‘clean coal’. Of course, there is no such thing, it’s cleaner coal.”

He called for a rational and a “techno-economic” based approach rather than simply appeasing different stakeholders with vested commercial interests.

“I do believe we do not need any new coal whatsoever; we need less coal in the mix,” Yelland said.

“And that’s not to say we should switch off coal fired power stations but we should simply let them come to their end of natural life, decommission them and replace them with newer technologies.”

While the draft IRP noted a decision had to be made regarding “the extension and possibly the expansion of the nuclear power programme”, Yelland said nuclear was the wrong technology for South Africa.

“The capital costs are high, it takes a very long time to build. New coal and new nuclear will take 10 years to build. We know that from Medupi and Kusile and it’s not like we have a lot of experience in building nuclear power stations,” Yelland said.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.