South Africa will not need any new coal baseload electricity until 2030 if it can get renewable energy online quicker to plug the ongoing power supply deficit.
This is the view of Hilton Trollip, an independent consultant in energy research and a research fellow in the Global Risk Governance programme at the University of Cape Town.
Trollip’s views are aligned with those of activists and European countries who want to see South Africa accelerate its just energy transition programme and dump fossil fuels for its baseload electricity generation.
Speaking at the Heinrich Böll Foundation webinar on the costs of electricity from Koeberg nuclear power station, Trollip said on Friday that South Africa’s baseload electricity was at least 85% dependent on coal power, which was an enormous amount of fossil fuels.
Trollip said that new electricity generation modelling systems nowadays were most preoccupied with an energy mix that was in favour of renewables, and not coal power.
However, Trollip said it was impossible to have an argument about systems, with so many elements in them that play such different roles in power systems.
“To say that you have to have dispatchable power or baseload because dispatchable power or baseload is needed at the load side is a difficult question,” Trollip said.
“So in adding to a system that has got a lot just in general to a system with lots of baseload, you can add a lot of variable renewables until you need new baseload to start backing up the variable renewables.
“Except, the word baseload is now falling out of the discourse around modelling such systems. We now call it firm power, and firm power can be provided by the combination of variable renewables, storage and baseload.
“So the reason I say that we don’t need new baseload is because I have read in-depth modelling reports, and that’s what they find.”
Meanwhile, the government of Germany on Friday committed further funding of R6.2 billion (€355 million) for a just energy transition and skills development for the next two-year cycle.
This was during the 2022 government-to-government negotiations on South African-German development co-operation in Pretoria.
European nations last year pledged R131bn ($8.5bn) at COP26 to help South Africa phase out coal-fired power stations over the next 15-20 years.
South Africa and Germany reconfirmed the five bilateral focal areas of peaceful and inclusive societies, climate and energy, sustainable economic development, training and employment as well as health and pandemics.
Birgit Pickel, director-general for Africa at the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development said the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) was a milestone in international co-operation.
Pickel emphasised Germany’s strong commitment to this partnership to support a clean and just transition towards climate neutrality in South Africa, and the economic base of the coal basin in policy discussion around JETP.
South Africa and Germany will further strengthen the existing bilateral Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and skills development co-operation and complement these with further initiatives focusing on pathways from learning to earning.
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