Essay by Eric Worrall
UN funded climate activists are trying to turn South Africa into a playground for their failed energy ideas.
Coal’s executioners gather to plot the kill
By Nick O’Malley
January 7, 2023 — 12.10am…
Coal’s new high price might be creating short-term profits, but it is also destroying demand.
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Countries such as China and India are still building plants permitted and contracted over the past decade, but are rapidly turning towards renewables. At the end of 2021, the coal industry’s key financiers – China, Japan and South Korea – declared they would no longer invest in new offshore coal plants.
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And with coal costs so high, even China’s new plants are running far below capacity.
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Under the so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy) the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $US8.5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as seed money for a fund to purchase and close South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewables.
South Africa is the perfect laboratory for such a program because it has some of the world’s best access to sun and wind. And because it has, even by a dirty industry’s standards, a particularly dirty coal fleet. As a result, a dollar spent greening South Africa cuts far more carbon than a dollar spent in, say, Europe.
The model is also in keeping with one of the Paris Agreement’s core principles, which recognises that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in tackling climate change.
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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/coal-s-executioners-gather-to-plot-the-kill-20230105-p5cani.html
South Africa has horrible problems with energy supply and crime, organised criminals are substituting low quality coal for high grade coal on a vast scale, and allegedly selling the stolen coal to Europe. So I’m not sure how adding high value, easily detachable solar panels to South Africa’s energy mix will in any way help their situation.
And Europe desperately needs that allegedly stolen coal. For all their green rhetoric, Germany is so desperate for coal, they are on the verge of demolishing a village to expand a coal mine, to try to plug their energy shortages.
I don’t know what the word is for turning the suffering of South Africa into a laboratory for testing ideas which have utterly failed at home. Hypocrisy doesn’t seem to cover the full enormity and ugliness of what they are doing.
Lots of recyclable copper in those windmills.
More a case of wasps around the honeypot, isn’t it? At least until the Chinese muscle their way in. They’ll be more like hornets.
I agree. The vulnerable need the most help, not to be experimental labs.
More widely, does the journalist in the SMH believe that China has really built out, or at least approved, all the coal powered power planes it will ever build? It would be lovely if it was true, but I doubt it. And has he noticed that Germany is turning back to coal? I know that the intentions of climate reporters are good, but they rarely have any sense of the real world. Hiss was, frankly, a very silly article.
Allan
“UN funded climate activists … “
And where is the UN getting the money? Maybe we’ve found a new target for defunding …
South Africa has enormous natural gas deposits under the Karoo and off the south coast. To exploit it would revolutionise South Africa in terms of ubiquitous, clean and cheap energy. Unfortunately a solid core of rich, white liberals have adopted the western “Green” mantra and have been able to keep the places they love to holiday in out of the clutches of “Big Energy” and so no downstream economic benefits and unemployment remains at over 40%.
“South Africa is the perfect laboratory “
Really? What about cold hard reality?
“Andre de Ruyter’s resignation, announced by Eskom on 14th December 2022, comes after Minister Gwede Mantashe accusing him of allowing load shedding to continue while “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state”. Remember that corruption is at the heart of Eskom’s problems, and de Ruyter was making inroads into rooting out corruption, so for Mantashe to blame De Ruyter for acting like a “policeman” as a reason for load shedding is just ludicrous.”
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the load-shedding schedule is often updated multiple times a day to keep up with the never-ending unit failures and is at an all-time high despite a new Eskom board having been appointed.
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A shortage of money and lack of funding from the government has forced Eskom to cut back on maintenance and repairs. This has been exacerbated by corruption and theft of equipment and fuel on a grand scale which seems to be an ongoing problem. Aging power stations have become targets for sophisticated theft operations, involving corrupt officials, trucking companies, and police, stealing fuel to the value of millions of ZAR.
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Eskom lacks key technical skills and the required competencies required to perform maintenance proficiently
https://www.alternative-energy-sources.co.za/energy-crisis-in-south-africa/
It’s a real mess and that’s just the politics of it.
“By supporting Ramaphosa and his attempts to quash the judicial process, the ANC is undermining the rule of law in the same way that it did under Zuma. In the process, it is accelerating South Africa’s descent towards state failure.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/15/south-africa-has-become-a-rotten-kleptocracy/
If SA is the perfect laboratory, you have to wonder exactly what criteria they are using.
It’s updated mercantilism: send us your (cheap and useful) coal, and we’ll send you (expensive and uneconomic) solar panels and wind turbines.
So, they are openly admitting they are racists determined to kill black people. Got it.
If this is truly supposed to be an experiment, the entire project and infrastructure should be made ONLY with “green power”. Let’s see how far they get with that!!
Quite a few comments on this page seem to be missing the true picture. This is not really an example of corrupt big business capturing government, but rather State capture of a big and essential business.
The stupendous corruption and incompetence of the ANC is a big leg-up on this destructive project. Without their bumbling interference Eskom might have had the ability to maintain their power plants and replace old ones with modern advanced ultrasupercritical plants. Unfortunately the money for maintenance went to replacing the experienced management with political cronies and bloating the Eskom workforce with badly needed ANC voters.
Of course, if you read South Africannewspapers or watch television you will see that the green thinking cult has captured the country too.
Quote:”South Africa is the perfect laboratory
So was Spain
So was Germany
So was SoCal
So was Australia
So was Texas
It’s a win, win situation. They get to pretend to be helping the environment while keeping Africans poor. Keeping Africans poor keeps the birthrates high so they have a nice supply of “climate refugees“ to fit their narrative.
Anyone who thinks anywhere in Africa could be a testbed for anything is clearly out of touch with reality…oh wait! We are talking about the alternative energy source crowd here.
Clue: What isn’t nailed down is stolen or broken. What is nailed down just takes a little longer to steal or break…..
They are trying to bail out the ANC and its many cronies.
November 2021 Germany pledges billions of euros to help wean South Africa off coal. Mid 2022 Germany spending billions of euros on importing South African coal.
South Africa has the 8th largest coal reserves in the world. Germany has the 6th largest. In Africa Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, Botswana and DR Congo all have greater coal reserves than the UK. Zambia, Egypt, Niger, Central African Republic and Malawi also have large reserves.
If African coal is good enough for Germany why is it not good enough for Africa?
While ever there are corrupt, military governed regimes in Africa, the UN and it’s edicts will continue to prosper there – they know by gifting western cash to dubious leaders, they will adopt anything they are being told to, regardless whether it serves the masses, makes any sense, or not
We can only hope the masses eventually see through the smoke & mirrors and actually decide they want cheap, plentiful, secure and reliable energy and make it happen
South Africa, like Zimbabwe before it, is for all intents and purposes, a failed state.
I suppose it’s appropriate for them to have a failed electric grid as well.
South Africa’s electrical power problems go back a lot further and politics unintentionally? aggravated the situation.
Presuming my memory serves me correctly, in 1991 they were one of the top ten power producers with a design capacity of 45’000 megawatts employing some 10’600 employees.
They built up to some 47’600 employees, of which 3’000 left the last two years, and ESKOM is now only producing about 60% of their design capacity. Over and above servicing a lot of new direct customers, it would appear that part of this increase was because the Dept. of Labour insisted that 50% of the labour force must be female and that the white to black ratio should represent the average in SA.
Up to that stage power stations would be taking one of their units off line at a time to do the necessary and essential precautionary maintenance as specified by the manufacturers. Understandably, the women did not like working in the 30 to 40 C and were instead put into offices, and senior experienced staff that saw a bleak career future ahead of them found ready employment worldwide.
Presumably? that resulted in a shortage of maintenance staff and why one of the not so bright top management team said it would make more sense to instead repair and do the maintenance work when they broke down. This made their budget requests look good for a few years before reality caught up with them/us, and, aggravated by a lot of other problems, including those mentioned in the blog, resulted in the present situation.
I understand from a recent well researched news article that although the coal fired plants are old, most are still within their expected lifespan and that problems are mainly due to lack of scheduled maintenance and experienced staff. Obviously their generation capacity must be replaced very shortly and maybe why the grasping for any form of new generation capacity, especially if part funded by third parties.
Finally, do not even start to talk about the two new (biggest in the world?) coal power stations that have come in at over twice their (inflated) budgets and timing and are still not fully operational.
I don’t care what energy source they use as long as it’s not nuclear. I’m too pro-nuclear to risk its future by allowing a criminally corrupt regime to operate such a facility when they have so much trouble maintaining other infrastructure. Their existing nuclear plants have capacity factors of about 80% when well run nuclear plants have capacity factors exceeding 90%.
My understanding is that 97% of that aid is in loans so yes are just getting a ton of dept. And of course intermittent renewables cannot “replace” dispatchable coal fired power. Amazing how people keep saying this.
Sasol was a great company for many years producing 200,000 bbl/day of fuels and chemicals from coal in South Africa. They had top notch engineering and chemistry at the time. But the change in SA regime to eliminate apartheid had the side effect of causing a massive brain drain of quality people. Many went to the US and I worked with quite a number of them over the years. They left because there were few opportunities to advance in the new culture and they saw the demise of their society. But now the US and Canada benefit from thier experience in industry.
According to the author, climate change is creating warm temps in Europe and cold temps in North America. Heads I win. Tails you lose. Oh ya, and La Niña is creating cold temps in Australia. I think I got it.
The whole “JUST energy transition” (JET IP) reminds me of a line I read on a new Subtack (“environMENTAL”) a few weeks ago.
“The data show – clearly – this is not “just Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.” It’s not “just” a temporary dislocation as part of the energy “transition” to renewables. And it is certainly not – in terms of the poorest in the advanced and developing world – a “just transition”.
https://open.substack.com/pub/envmental/p/environmental-energy-and-economics?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
It doesn’t surprise me, that government must rank as one of the most corrupt ever in the world. They have presided over the total destruction of that economy and public infrastructure.