Erasibo

South Africans on an almost weekly basis are faced with the possibility that they will be left stranded without electrical power. This is because our state owned power company Eskom some how got their planning wrong and cant keep up with the demand of a growing economy. In response to their laid back approach to forecasting, Eskom are now going to be pumping billions of Rands into additional power generation facilities – of course we as consumers are going to have to foot the bill.

But money is not the only thing Eskom will be pumping. South Africa by all accounts has one of the cheapest electricity generation industries in the world. One of the reasons for this is because our electricity demand is met through the burning of coal. We are blessed with an abundance of coal in the North of the country. Coal however is the most polluting way to generate electricity.

Eskom has just been award second place by CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) on its list of most polluting power companies in the world. Eskom is dumping ~214,000,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year through burning as much fossil fuel. So coal is our saviour and our villain.

Obviously no country can afford to just stop its current methods for generating electricity. In South Africa the need for more power is not only being driven by the growing economy i.e. current users – residential and industrial – requiring more power, but also by more and more households connecting to the electricity grid for the first time; thanks to governments policies aimed at poverty alleviation and access to basic services.

Eskom and the South African government are currently investigating alternatives. Nuclear is being punted as one of these alternatives. The South African government is also looking at bio fuels systems, hybrid systems, hydro systems, solar energy systems; and wind energy systems as other alternatives. However it would seem that the view of the Department of Minerals and Energy is that these alternatives are suitable exclusively in South Africa’s rural areas.

To date programmes with a strong rural focus have not been implemented as successfully as they could be. Energy is a highly technical area requiring private sector buy in and investment. To date government has not been able to channel this buy in and investments successfully into rural areas just examine how successful the Integrated Sustainable Renewal Programme (ISRDP) has been at getting private sector action – not commitments– in the rural nodes.

Focusing on just one potential alterative, here is a video presentation given by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla on how Solar can be made a financially viable alternative to coal. What’s interesting about this presentation is how he pitches the economic viability of Solar.

You can download the slides as well.There is a lot of great and exciting work being done by entrepreneurs, governments, scientist and NGO’s worldwide to think up better ways to maximise renewal sources of energy. I like Khosla’s thrust that there is amble resource around us to power humanities needs, we must not underestimate our ingenuity.