South African and Moving Forward on Energy Needs

South African energy is at a fork in the road

With a coal-fired past and a part-renewable, part-nuclear future, jobs and cost will determine the country's path

A coal depot at Eskom Holdings power station in South Africa. Photograph: Nadine: Hutton/Getty Images

2 February 2011 - In October 2007 South Africans woke up to the fact that we have an electricity crisis.

The problem didn't develop overnight, of course. There was more than a decade of policy failure, as the government swung between a desire to introduce independent power producers and humour union demands that electricity generation remain a state-owned function. That meant no new generation capacity was built even as the economy expanded at a nice pace and an entire segment of the population, ignored under apartheid, was quickly connected to the grid.

State power company Eskom caused maintenance slippage and saw some power stations supplied with poor quality or wet thermal coal. Failure to invest in the transmission network meant it was impossible to shunt sufficient power from the generation hotspots in coal fields to the north to industrial hubs in the south and east.

But all of this only came home when, in the middle of unseasonably cold weather, ordinary South Africans were suddenly introduced to the concept of "load-shedding"; planned rolling blackouts that saw sections of the national network turned off for hours at a time. {continued}