SA's Energy Future - Food for Thought

Check out this Business Day article: "The myth that we have a choice between coal and nuclear for baseload must be challenged. The chairman of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Joe Wellinghoff, has said baseload capacity will become an anachronism. Inflexible plants are an impediment — costly and wasteful. If you have the ability to ramp up and down plants and shape the system, then the old concept of baseload becomes redundant. “You don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants that run all the time, we may not need any (more) ever,”"

In the meanwhile, Legalbrief informs us "Climate justice lobby group, 350.org South Africa, has filed a formal request in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act for information about a 'secretive' panel of experts finalising a 30-year SA energy plan behind closed doors."

Here is another short article on the subject of energy which our Chairman recently wrote to the Cape Times and Cape Community Papers:

"Very few people understand what 100 billion Rand is. It's similar to 100 Gigabytes of computer storage except that its money; 100,000 Million Rand. This gives us 5 Giga-Watts or 5,000,000,000 Watts of energy for electricity generation. If this power station is built in Mpumalanga to supply energy to Cape Town, possibly as much as 10% of this energy is lost on the transmission lines and 65% of the energy in the coal is lost in the whole process. This is why Eskom has and is considering nuclear in the Western Cape. There are also losses in the nuclear process.

But let's look at what else we South Africans can do with 100 Billion Rand.

100 billion Rand is equal to 10 million R10,000 solar water heaters. It takes 8 years to build a 5 GW Coal power station. Assuming 200 working days a year, South Africa could install at least 6,250 solar water heaters per working day. Assuming a team of 3 people to do an installation plus sales people plus electricians plus inspectors plus factories, managers, etc, we are looking at possibly 30,000 to 50,000 people employed in this industry. More employment. Less unemployment. More taxes. Fewer social welfare cheques. A perfect scenario for unskilled labour which South Africa has an abundance of.

Once a factory is making solar water heaters, it's not much more difficult to make solar chillers, ie air conditioners that work off the sun's energy.

A coal power station needs 8,000 people to build it and 1,000 people to run it plus huge resources in terms of road, rail, mines, electricity, etc to supply it. The sun runs itself, but obviously people will be needed to maintain solar water heating systems. Up to 40% of the energy a power station makes is used to supply it with fuel!

10 million solar water heaters would actually provide 20 GW of energy. Looking at this another way, Eskom would need to build 4 5GW coal power stations to provide the energy to run 10 million electrically powered water heaters (geysers). Or looking at this another way, by using solar energy to heat and cool water directly we only need a 1/4 of the money needed for the fossil fueled power station, and much less than a 1/4 if the power source is nuclear.

So let's look at the renewable energy alternatives and not just the fossil fueled alternatives South Africa is currently considering."