Court battle over Saudi power plant in Mpumalanga heats up

Environmental lobbyists are asking a high court judge to send a Saudi-based power producer – with plans to build a 300 megawatt coal-fired plant on the Mpumalanga Highveld – back to the drawing board.

For almost three years, local nonprofit organisation groundWork has been locked in legal battle over the then department of environmental affairs’ 2013 decision to grant authorisation for the proposed plant.

This is part of “Life After Coal” – a joint campaign by Earthlife Africa Johannesburg, groundWork and the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), which works against the development of new coal-fired power stations and mines, and towards reducing emissions from existing coal infrastructure, as well as encouraging a coal phase-out.

Now, lawyers from the Centre for Environmental Rights, who represent groundWork, say the environmental authorisation has expired and a confirmatory order is all that they need to bring an end to the litigation.

“If this is confirmed by the high court, ACWA Power will need to apply afresh for an environmental authorisation for the Khanyisa plant – a process that will likely take several years,” the lawyers said in a statement this week.

In 2014, the Coal Baseload Independent Power Producers Programme (Coal IPP) programme was launched in a bid to procure increased capacity and facilitate private sector participation in baseload generation.

And in 2016, then minister of energy Tina Joematt-Pettersson announced a consortium led by ACWA Power as the preferred bidder for one of the first of the programme’s projects: the Khanyisa Coal-Fired project.

But as the call for cleaner energy has grown louder so, too, have projects like this drawn criticism.

“The 2019 Integrated Resource Plan confirms that private coal power plants do not form part of a least-cost plan for SA’s energy future. Khanyisa is a project South Africa doesn’t need and cannot afford – not only in terms of its financial cost, but because of its negative health and climate implications,” groundWork director Bobby Peek said this week.

Last year, Nedbank pulled its funding for the Khanyisa Coal-Fired project to align with its broader position on climate change and the project has found itself at the centre of a number of legal challenges.

The crux of the case, in which groundWork wants the authorisation reviewed and set aside, is the nonprofit body’s claim that a climate change impact assessment was never conducted.

But, say the CER lawyers, this argument effectively became moot when the department of environment, fisheries and forestry last year found that the environmental authorisation had, in fact, lapsed back in 2018. As a result, groundWork earlier this month amended its court papers to ask the judge to confirm the department’s finding.

ACWA’s attorneys yesterday declined to comment and while a notice of motion to oppose the review application was filed in 2017, groundWork said in its amended court papers that no answering affidavit had been filed.

GroundWork said, in correspondence with ACWA, “it continues to insist, without proof, that the environmental authorisation remains valid and binding”.

The CER lawyers said the high court’s pronouncement on the issue could “ensure a permanent halt to this hazardous, dirty and costly project”.

“Without a valid environmental authorisation, ACWA cannot legally commence building the power plant,” CER said, “It also cannot reach commercial or financial close under the Coal IPP programme without an environmental authorisation, risking its ‘preferred bidder’ status under the Coal IPP Programme.”

– bernadettew@citizen.co.za

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