The renewable energy bandwagon is finally on the road to reality.
The reports of Eskom's incompetence with regards to the rollout and integration of renewable energy projects have, so far, been greatly exaggerated.
Speak to any renewable energy advocate - just strike up a conversation about your company installing solar panels with your most vocal intellectual friends and you’ll find a few - and they’ll have something to say about decentralised power generation. It’s the magic wishing stone of localised electricity that is meant to eliminate the loadshedding*, climate change and skyrocketing Eskom tariff albatrosses in one swing of a righteous sling.
*A note for international readers: this is the term used when the power utility doesn’t have enough generation capacity to cope with demand and it schedules outages to balance the grid at peak demand times.
But just like Goliath was merely acting on the command of his generals to settle the conflict in single combat, so too the Eskom villainy needs to be viewed through a more sympathetic lens. The David and Goliath story was meant as a telling of Saul’s cowardice and not the underdog tale it has been twisted into.
In 2010 the South African state-owned power utility, Eskom, faced a power shortage. When the World Bank approved its $3,75 billion loan in April of that year (shortly before the events of the FIFA World Cup) the then Obama administration abstained from the vote alongside the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Norway.
Building the Medupi power station and its 25-million-ton per annum carbon dioxide load would limit South Africa’s ability to meet its climate change goals. So it was agreed that $750 million of the loan would be reserved for renewable energy.
There was an additional clause added, mandating the construction of flue-gas desulphurisation equipment at Medupi to limit sulphur dioxide emissions. The problem is that circa 2020 that equipment costed around R42 billion, or 10 percent of Eskom’s current debt, and the hard deadline for completion was set for 2025. In response to the lawsuit against the government, Eskom is arguing that the environmental impact of installing the equipment should be considered over the exorbitant costs. It is alleging that this equipment would significantly increase water use and generate additional carbon emissions.
The savings made by not installing it can then, says Eskom, be used to adapt other coal plants to use other fuel.
Fast-forward to August 2020 and a tender goes out for a large-scale battery storage installation at the Sere Wind Farm in Vredendal - 300km north of Cape Town. This 100MW facility swallowed up around $375 million of the funding reserved for renewables and was fully commissioned in 2015 as Eskom’s first significant step to achieving the 42 percent renewables energy mix target it set for 2030 in the controversial Integrated Resource Plan (IRP).
A major part of that energy mix depends on the Independent Power Producers (IPP) developing adequate infrastructure to then sell to Eskom. Founding head of the CSIR Energy Centre and contributor to the IRP, Dr Bischof-Niemz argues that the IPPs market have been coming to the party and even saving the embattled entity’s bacon with regards to loadshedding. He attributes spiralling costs to spending on fuel to run the dinosaur juice ((diesel and coal) power mills.
With former Transnet and Eskom financial chief Anoj Singh giving the Zondo Commision a serious runaround, South Africa may never get the answers to the numerous questions around the Medupi construction overruns or the ballooning costs of the Majuba rail network project. The power utility, however, cannot fully be blamed for an incompetent handling of the transition to renewables.
My read: South Africa’s energy Goliath is fighting on the battlefield of the previous administration’s creation and the triumph of cost-competitive renewables is more an indication of the failings of our numerous Minsters of Energy than a reflection of the employees who are currently also fighting for survival within a failing Eskom.
There are plans in place to upgrade the power grip to a smarter integration, but the costs involved are enormous. South Africa is cannot stomach the risk of new technologies and Eskom doesn’t have the funds to transition its workforce to meet the demands of this new reality. Think about it this way: technicians need to be retrained to manage the new set of tools needed to manage new energy technologies.
It simply isn’t as simple as putting up advanced solar panels and windmills all over the place when Eskom PCs are still running on Windows XP.
Progress will be slow, but it is happening.
Something you should know about:
You don’t need to delete WhatsApp. I wrote as thorough an explainer as I could on my blog and you can watch Emma Sadlier’s video commentary here, but the short answer is that the policy change is required to be more transparent about the profile information shared across the Facebook group of companies, and WhatsApp doesn’t have access and doesn’t share the contents of your messages.
A number that may only interest me:
3,25
The multiplication of effective bandwidth AMD claims its Infinity Cache amplifies when integrated with 256-bit 16 Gbps GDDR6. This will become important when RDNA 2 graphics cards hit laptops later this year and when Samsung integrates AMD’s RDNA technology into its next Exynos SoC.
You may want to hold off on buying the Samsung Galaxy S21 that is being launched later today if this makes any sense to you…
A quote that sounded profound when I heard/said it:
“The smart mask intends to help improve the convenience of daily wear while overcoming common social interaction challenges…” - Razer press release.
Context: the Project Hazel concept is a transparent N95 mask that includes voice amplification and active cooling.