There has been a lot of talk about the “Just Energy Transition”. To be clear about it, it is definitely not “just”, and second, we don't need an urgent panic-stations transition, particularly not the one being forced on us by foreign countries telling us to do what they say.
They also use the devious stunt of offering financial incentives, via newspapers, which look like gifts of cash, but are not. Their money is mostly in the form of loans that need to be repaid, and also, they come with strong strings attached. Not so much “strings” but huge pieces of thick rope. Frequently we have to use the loan to buy goods from them and then repay the money, as well as pay for the purchase. So effectively we pay twice.
Behind all of this, they use a moral justification that we have to help “save the planet” from a mainly imaginary threat. So we are told to stop using coal and to “transition” to wind and solar power… and we must do it fast because the chief of the UN says so. On this topic, the chief of the UN has shown himself to be usually wrong.
A rapid shift to wind and solar is undoubtedly not “just”. The communities around the coal plants lose their jobs, and community life in the nearby towns and villages largely collapses. It is plain nonsense to claim that all these people will find different jobs in renewable energy projects.
The renewable systems are essentially entirely imported. There are no local manufacturing jobs created in fabrication, they are all created in places like Germany and China.
I am not at all opposed to wind and solar, and I have never said or written one word against them, as energy sources. What I have done is to point out that you cannot run an electric train from Johannesburg to Cape Town, on solar and wind. Solar and wind are not solutions for industrial systems.
What is now necessary is to search for sensible uses for modern solar and wind in unique applications in Africa. There must be many. Trying to plug them all into the national grid is not the way to go. Even worse is to talk of building an extra 14,000km of hugely expensive long-distance transmission lines to carry solar power all the way from the Northern Cape to Gauteng and then saying that the enormous cost is not part of the cost of solar. We must stop kidding the public.
There are also other technical problems such as a grid system needing a “spinning reserve” and wind and solar do not provide that. Coal and nuclear do. We need to take all the false “save the planet” emotion out of the supposed “just” solution and instead build an electricity system that serves the people of our beautiful country.
The answer is to keep running the coal plants and to rapidly start building substantial new nuclear. Nuclear will satisfy the political requirement to not produce carbon dioxide, though the wind and solar protagonists try their level best to cover that up.
As the planet advances, with the natural passage of time, I do not doubt that coal will fade away due to natural economic forces and be replaced by nuclear power. But we must not stop mining the coal. What we need is to build more Sasol-type operations. Coal is very valuable as a source of valuable chemicals. Sasol knows this, since they produce petrol, lipstick, and ladies' face cream from coal. Sasol is a very strategic operation and produces about a third of all of SA’s petrol. They should be using Small Nuclear Reactors to produce the heat to convert the coal.
SA needs a new large nuclear plant, a new Koeberg which has been spectacularly successful for 40 years.
But we also need to develop several Small Modular Reactors (SMR) around the country. The SA-developed SMR, the HTMR-100 can be placed anywhere, from Free State gold mines to Limpopo agricultural developments. This SMR does not need to be built near a large body of water.
We need to think and plan African solutions for Africa, developed by the people who live here.
There must be no confrontation between nuclear, wind and solar. All nuclear people are happy with wind and solar, when used correctly. Sadly, in contrast, wind and solar protagonists seem hell-bent on destroying nuclear, come what may. One has to ask why. Where is the so-called “just transition” money going? But most important is proper planning at the initial stages of decision-making.
If you start on a hike through the bush and you choose the wrong path to start with, no amount of refining your decision will get you onto the path that you should have taken at the start.
- Dr Kemm is a nuclear physicist and is Chairman of Stratek Global (Pty) Ltd, Energy Development Strategists, an energy development company based in Pretoria.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.