South Africa's Electricity Mix

Why moving away from coal isn't "just"

I was recently interviewed on PowerFM where I defended South Africa’s usage of coal. My belief is that South Africa should look towards what the Chinese are doing by upgrading their Coal PowerStations to HELE coal. Much of the hype about China's new coal power stations is overblown and removed from reality. Many of those new stations are just upgrades of an older ones and not actually additional power stations.

The Chinese leadership understand that it’s easier to replace one component of a system than to redesign the entire grid and that there are social costs involved by just uprooting a community in the name of “justice”.

China is not adding new capacity for electricity generation, they are rather going for an energy addition before making the move towards an energy transition.

High Efficiency Low Emissions (HELE) coal not only reduces emissions, but it also adds capacity to the grid by using supercritical water that drives up the efficiency as the Rankine cycle goes from 33% to 45%. This upgrade alone makes coal cost competitive with natural gas under certain circumstances.

Then there is an adaptation requirement as the type of coal might change. But because South Africa ran out of higher quality coal, we might not achieve those efficiencies, but the policy will still be directional and it can even keep the environmentalists happy as it reduces C02 per unit of electricity.

The other country that is defending coal and actually improving the burning process is Japan. They are adding ammonia to the coal so that the burning process can be cleaner and the C02 emissions reduced.

Whatever the path forward, South Africa cannot simply just let go of coal, we are the most dependent country in the world in that regard.

Despite being vilified, coal remains the backbone of South Africa’s Industrial Economy.

It will be foolish to kick the estimated 2.5 million people in the wider Mpumalanga region in the face in the name of a “just” transition, especially because when our government knows that alternative solutions do exist.

Coal is still a viable solution and we shouldn’t look away from it simply because it is politically unpopular.