Cost of sulphur dioxide emissions from Kusile ‘may be 700 lives a year’

Given South Africa’s desperate need for electricity, it’s either power or pollution – and pollution has won the day.

Eskom announced the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment (DFFE) had confirmed it would be allowed to run Kusile power station until 31 March, 2025 without the technology required to reduce harmful sulphur dioxide emissions.

Environmental lobby groups noted their disappointment and said the department could have made a detailed mitigation plan for those affected.

Eskom’s health impact assessments

Brandon Abdinor of the Centre for Environmental Rights said load shedding was causing a lot of hardship, “but at the same time, this decision, according to the models we are working with, is going to cause more than 700 deaths per year and billions [of rands] in terms of health costs, emergency room and asthma visits”.

“We are expecting people who live close to Kusile to sacrifice their lives for extra electricity. It just shows we keep pouring money into this dirty coal-fired energy system, which has caused so much of a health crisis for decades,” he said.

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“We don’t believe the health impact assessments Eskom has conducted are adequate, and we’re not comfortable with the public participation processes, either.”

In a statement, the department noted the national air quality officer, Dr Patience Gwaze – in concurrence with the Nkangala district municipality as the atmospheric emissions licence authority – had granted the exemption with conditions.

According to a letter from the DFFE, mitigation measures included “at minimum, independent health screenings and the referral of people requiring healthcare to the appropriate public health facilities for treatment”.

However, Abdinor said theprescribed mitigation measures, were very broad and “history shows these kinds of measures aren’t undertaken properly, so how are we going to ensure that the people who live there get properly screened and then get proper treatment”?

“They cannot rely on public health facilities, which are not even equipped or empowered to assist with the kind of respiratory issues we see,” he said.

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“We could have had things like the establishment of mobile clinics, chronic healthcare and chronic treatment programmes for respiratory health issues. We could see the establishment of a compensation fund.

“What the department has put forward is really very thin and depends a lot on Eskom’s goodwill and the future plan the power utility still needs to submit.”

Pollution exemption ‘a victory’

Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has claimed the pollution exemption as a victory for the power utility and said it allowed Eskom to return units into operation earlier than anticipated, “adding 2 400 megawatts of capacity, which equates to two and a half stages of blackouts.

“We want to say to the country and people in those localities that Eskom will do everything possible to ensure we minimise the impact of sulphur dioxide that gets to be emitted into the environment,” he said.

He stressed the power utility was meeting all its emissions parameters, excluding sulphur dioxide.

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Robyn Hugo, director of climate change engagement at Just Share, said it came as no surprise that the department had “once again decided the health and well-being of people in the highveld priority area [are] of little concern to the government”.

“This despite the 2022 Deadly Air court decision against the state, which held that chronic air pollution in the highveld priority area violates constitutional rights,” Hugo said.

The decision did not specify the consequences of a failure to ensure measures were constitutionally adequate, so “the department can expect this decision to be appealed”.

Reducing exemptions

Greenpeace Africa climate and energy campaigner Nhlanhla Sibisi said, according to research, the minimum emission standards were nowhere near being met in the country.

“In a nutshell, the granting of the exemption is actually not taking into consideration the lives of people and, especially, the more vulnerable people,” he said.

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Granting the exemption went against the commitment South Africa had made to reducing emissions.

“We do recognise that people are in dire need of having energy, but we can’t do it at the cost of the lives of the very people that require energy,” he said.

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za