by PD Lawton May 22, 2022
Since the time of President Thabo Mbeki, plans have been made periodically to increase South Africa’s nuclear output. Currently, Africa’s only nuclear power plant, Koeberg, supplies electricity to Cape Town, a city of just under 5 million residents. The Cape Town economy accounts for 72% of the Western Province’s economic activity (2016 figures) with manufacturing being the second largest contributor after finance and business. Because of the manufacturing sector, unemployment is the lowest of any South African capital city. Manufacturing provides productive employment. Production requires electricity.
More than two decades ago, plans were once again launched to expand the nuclear energy industry. At the time, national debates on the subject were still dominated by strong anti-nuclear South African leading environmentalists and economists such as Grové Steyn and Patrick Bond.
Patrick Bond, now a professor of economics at the University of the Western Cape is a believer in Global Warming (now renamed Climate Change because temperatures and sea levels don’t rise with nifty lies). by Al Gore and despite his education, Bond jokes that he calls CO2 a pollutant.
Bond likes slogans like these: Leave the oil in the soil, leave the coal in the hole, leave the tar in the sand. Such statements, he said, “are the epitome of a clear, well-thought-out political strategy.”
Incredibly, Grové Steyn, Meridian Economics, and a member of Eskom’s Sustainability Task Group, said in a paper titled “ The Future of Nuclear Power in South Africa: Challenges of decision making under uncertainty` that the future is uncertain and therefore we must not plan for it!
Unfortunately, due to pressure from the green lobby, the expansion plan was abandoned.
This leaves 80% of South Africa’s energy coming from coal.
Let us put that into perspective. Sub-Saharan Africa uses the same amount of electricity as a relatively small European country, Spain.
50% of that electricity is produced in South Africa.
80% of that is from coal.
600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity.
900 million households do not have an alternative to wood or manure for cooking, which is labor- and time-consuming, has negative effects on respiratory health and causes mass deforestation and waste emissions. large amount of CO2.
In fact, you can honestly say that by building coal-fired plants in southern Africa, you can reduce your CO2 emissions!
Renewable energy has its place but is not the primary energy source of any industrialized economy. It is through the production of goods, be it value added in agriculture, high-tech components, tractors, machine tools, household appliances or even bread, that sub-Saharan African economies will reduce poverty by providing productive employment and promoting economic growth.
Not all African countries have coal, in fact most do not. South Africa and Mozambique have abundant reserves, followed by Botswana and Zimbabwe. South Africa produced 254,411 tonnes and Mozambique 13,893 tonnes as of 2019.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1275700/coal-production-in-africa-by-country/
Solar and wind energy, if intermittent, can supply both urban and rural communities, can and does contribute to the national grid, however renewable energy requires coal or nuclear as fuel. base load (minimum constant 24/7) for redundancy. Ironically, wind turbines and solar panels can only be produced using non-renewable energy sources.
In Western Europe, hydroelectricity makes sense. The European climate is not prone to drought and high evaporation due to extreme temperatures. Most hydroelectric dams, like those in Scandinavia, are located in valleys of narrow width and deep water, as opposed to the shallow and widening water levels, which are generally the state of hydroelectric dams. electricity in sub-Saharan Africa due to geography. Shallow dams in hot climates lose a large part of their evaporation.
The countries of Western Europe are geographically very small. Most countries in Western Europe are minute relative to African countries. This fact is still overlooked by European foreign policymakers who are not well educated in the geography of Africa and who have the habit of thinking they know better.
Germany has repeatedly imposed anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel policies on Africa, which is considered a big country by European standards. Germany is the 5th largest county in Western Europe. Norway and Sweden are the 3rd and 4th largest. However, most of Norway and most of Sweden are uninhabited or uninhabitable.
https://www.wwf.org.za/?16701/nuclear-debate-review
Germany is 357,168 square kilometers.
Spreading in a strip across central South Africa is a semi-desert known as the Karoo or Great Karoo. It covers 400 000 square kilometers, bigger than the whole of Germany. This is a loved and very beautiful part of South Africa but is not as significant as South Africa, consisting of 9 vast provinces. It has a coastline along both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans extending for more than 2,850 km.
The total land area of South Africa is 1,220,813 square kilometers.
From Cape Town in the west to the port city of Durban in the east, it is 1,272 km when crows fly and 1,636 km by road.
The distance from Pretoria to Cape Town is the same as from Rome to London.
The capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa’s largest sub-Saharan country, is Kinshasa, located in the west. Bukavu is the provincial capital of South Kivu located in the east. The distance between the two cities Kinshasa and Bukavu is 2,494km, slightly smaller than the distance between London and Moscow.
Democratic Republic of the Congo is 2,344,858 square kilometers.
The Mercator projection used as a standard in world maps is Eurocentric. The distortion makes North America and Europe appear much larger than they really are.
Why is size important in relation to power?
The national energy grid for the average African country is not comparable in size to a country in Western Europe. The transmission distance in Africa is very long, much larger than in Western Europe.
Because the resistive properties of metals include conductive lines, the farther the current travels, the less current flows at the destination. Therefore, power lines at very long distances drain a significant amount of available power.
The length of transmission cables, the energy infrastructure, needed for Africa is particularly difficult. The cost of transporting fuel, be it coal or diesel, is much greater.
What is the real cost of a hydroelectric dam thousands of kilometers away from an urban area?
Also: Germany, the most populous country in Western Europe, has 83 million people.
Europe’s population growth rate is 0.06%, the lowest of all countries in the world. Europe (including Russia) has 11% of the world’s population. Europe covers about 2% of the entire Earth’s surface and 6.8% of the land area with Russia accounting for 39% of that total land area.
Spain has a population of 47 million people.
South Africa (2011 census) has 60.1 million people with an estimated 5 million additional unregistered people.
There are 1.4 billion people in Africa, which is 16.72% of the total world population.
And now consider the amount of electricity that people in Africa consume.
map
France uses 6,940kWh per capita using uranium from Niger, using 51kWh per capita. (Data from 2014)
Germany uses 7,035kWh.
South Africa uses 4,198kWh.
DRC uses 109kWh per capita.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/energy-consumption-by-country
Energy consumption in South Africa is the highest in the continent. That is why millions of Africans come to South Africa in search of jobs and business opportunities. The higher the energy consumption, the higher the standard of living, the hotter the economy.
Electricity means better life. And 80% of the better life in South Africa comes from coal.
So when the Europeans imposed a green energy policy on Africa, they did it with complete ignorance of the Sleeping Giant. And by their complete ignorance of condemning coal and nuclear power, they condemn 1.4 billion people to a future of poverty when most of those 1.4 billion people do not use much electricity. like a light bulb.
A UK family boils a kettle twice a day, using five times more electricity per person in Mali per year
It takes an Ethiopian 87 times more to consume 150kW of electricity hours than a person in the UK
It takes a Tanzanian 8 years to consume as much electricity as an American consumes in 1 month
A freezer in the United States consumes 10 times more electricity than a Liberian uses in 1 year.
Every human being wants to breathe clean air and drink pure water. Most humans want to protect the natural kingdom that is not assigned a role by God. No one wants to live in poverty of creativity, with no future. Only human innovation can bring the solution.
Nuclear power technology meets all the requirements of clean energy. And until nuclear power can power Africa’s cities and industries, let fossil fuels, hydro and gas, solar and wind and whatever. reduce the energy deficit of sub-Saharan Africa. Africans are tired of living in the dark and they are tired of European energy policies.
South Africa is currently in a bad economic situation due to a lack of investment in the physical economy. If the situation in South Africa continues as it is, by 2030 existing manufacturing/industrial plants will have to close due to insufficient electricity. Currently, there is no incentive to invest in new manufacturing plants because there is not enough energy.
Energy poverty perpetuates poverty because electricity is the foundation of all economic development. It is time for the West to stop with its energy imperialism.
Yemi Osinbajo, vice president of Nigeria recently said:
“Restricting investment in natural gas in Africa will not help curb carbon emissions globally, but will do much to hurt the continent’s economic outlook. Africa is short on energy right now: excluding South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s one billion people have a generating capacity of just 81 gigawatts – much less than the UK’s 108 gigawatts. Furthermore, those one billion people contributed less than one percent to cumulative global carbon emissions. “
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