EDITORIAL: ANC devotion to coal will lead to ruin of the country

In many ways, our government seems to be at war with its own policies on climate change. The government committed SA to emissions reduction targets that can only be achieved if there is a rapid switch from coal-powered to renewable energy. But still, many in government are loudly opposed to a ramp-down of the coal industry.

And the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan approved and endorsed by the cabinet, before being paraded at COP27 in Egypt in November by President Cyril Ramaphosa, just “doesn’t sit well” with some ANC legislators.

Instead of turning our attention to renewable energy, which is cleaner, cheaper and much quicker to get onto the grid than coal-generated power, these MPs think the solution to SA’s dirty energy is clean coal technology.

As minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele this week told MPs in the mineral resources & energy committee, when they were offended by climate change and the floods that devastated KwaZulu-Natal earlier this year being mentioned in the same sentence, “we can disagree on almost anything, but we have to at least agree on the science”.

Energy analyst and MD of EE Business Intelligence Chris Yelland has an unambiguous view of clean-coal technologies. They have been around for many years, he says, but Eskom has either not bothered to use them, or has been unable to get them to work right. Yelland, who has written in detail about the different so-called clean coal technologies (which, he says, can more accurately be refered to as “less-dirty” technologies) are convinced this is not a practical solution.

These technologies are hugely expensive and would only make SA’s already pricey electricity even more costly. Also, our electricity would still be dirty, a little less so, but very far from clean.

There are many reasons SA must progress as fast as money will allow with the reform and transition of the energy sector, and why this should not include a business-as-usual coal industry.

The first and most obvious is the deep crisis the country finds itself in with electricity supply. The system is obviously broken, to some extent beyond repair. There is an immediate power supply gap of 4,000MW to 6,000MW, but this gap will continue to widen as Eskom’s coal fleet ages and as it retires about 22,000MW of generation capacity (about half of current installed capacity of about 45,000MW) by 2035. The only way that SA can move fast enough (and get sufficient funding in a fossil-fuel averse investment world) to have any chance of crossing this widening gap is to aggressively pursue a renewable energy strategy.

The other reason this must happen, as people such as Gungubele and forestry, fisheries and the environment minister Barbara Creecy are at pains to convince their colleagues in government about, is because SA will find itself locked out of global trade if it does not clean up its energy sector.

Unlike the rest of Africa, SA cannot claim to have contributed almost nothing to historic emissions which have set the world on course for warming of, it now seems, at least 2°C. SA is one of the most emissions intensive economies and most coal-dependent countries in the world.

If this does not change, and if it means that SA will fail to meet its global emissions reduction commitments, our exports, which account for about 30% of GDP (goods and services), will not be welcome in a transitioning world.

Arguing that SA should exploit its coal resources simply because we have so much of it, is spectacularly unimaginative and stubborn. Besides, to quote Yelland, SA still has a lot of asbestos but we stopped mining it when better options became available that were less likely to do a lot of harm.