Concerns about climate usually trigger utopian solutions in policy discussions in South Africa. The much-touted option is to shut down Eskom plants and replace them with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Problem solved? That’s what some lobbyists think.
But our energy future is not that simple. It is a well-known scientific fact that renewables don’t have the capacity to provide baseload or readily dispatchable power due to their inherent dependency on the vagaries of weather. They can be deployed only as supplementary to existing baseload power...
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