A judge is set to rule after the first ever case filed against the government over its alleged failure to crack down on air pollution emitted by power plants operated by Eskom Holdings and refineries owned by Sasol. The case was filed in the Pretoria High Court by groundWork, an environmental-rights organization, and the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action in 2019 and was heard by Judge Colleen Collis this week. The respondents in the case include President Cyril Ramaphosa, Environment Minister Barbara Creecy and provincial officials.
Johannesburg, Africa’s dominant financial center, wants to meet 35% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030 and will seek proposals for privately supplied power by August. South Africa’s biggest city, with a population of over 5 million people, is looking for its own power suppliers after the government last year said municipalities could buy electricity from companies other than state power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.
Kenya Electricity Generating Co, Africa’s geothermal pioneer, plans to raise $1.95-billion to build new, and upgrade existing plants in a bid to almost double its power output from the renewable fuel. KenGen, as the Kenyan State-owned company is known, plans to add 651 MW from underground steam in the next five years, said Cyrus Karingithi, an assistant manager for resource development and infrastructure. Most of the funds will be sought from development financiers, Karingithi said in an interview on Tuesday at a geothermal field located about 120 km northwest of the capital Nairobi.
Renewable energy company Enel Green Power South Africa country manager William Price comments that, despite the delays experienced with the procurement of capacity under the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), he is not surprised by the country’s continuous project development in the renewable energy space. He notes that this is driven by high utility price increases, the continuation of load-shedding and the ever-increasing demand for energy.
Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has again swatted aside calls for a 50 MW licence-exemption threshold for distributed-generation plants, describing such calls, which have been made by organised business and even endorsed by Eskom, as “academic” in light of a departmental survey showing that mines, factories and farms were satisfied with an increase in the cap to only 10 MW. Delivering his Budget Vote amid a return to load-shedding, Mantashe said some 10 000 respondents had been surveyed and had indicated that they would not be ready to pursue projects larger than 10 MW in size.
Eskom has suspended load-shedding for Tuesday morning and afternoon, and is expected to implement it again at 17:00. The power utility said the round of stage 2 cuts will then run until 22:00 on Tuesday night, the original ending time for the round of load-shedding announced on Sunday. “Over the past 24 hours Eskom teams have returned seven generation units to service. This has helped ease the supply constraints, and enabled Eskom to suspend load-shedding at this point. However, this is currently insufficient to fully supply the evening peak,” the utility said.
UK-based global industrial technology group Rolls-Royce has announced that the small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) consortium that it leads has upgraded the SMR’s design and increased its power output. This announcement, on Monday, marked the completion of the first phase of the project, which was achieved on time and under budget. Further, the consortium (UK SMR) aims not only to be assessed by UK regulators during the second half of this year, but also to be the first reactor design to be assessed by them during this, just opened, assessment ‘window’. This would keep the programme on course to construct its first SMR early next decade and have built as many as ten by 2035.
Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Ebrahim Patel announced that an “accord” had been reached at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to drive progressive localisation of up to R200-billion of additional production over a five-year period. Delivering his virtual Budget Vote, Patel said the strategy had the support of major corporates and that 30 ‘CEO champions’ – including Mamongae Mahlare of Illovo, Mark Cutifani of Anglo American, Vikesh Ramsunder of Clicks, Fleetwood Grobler of Sasol and Fortune Majapelo of Bushveld – had been nominated from the private sector to support the localisation push.
The share price of JSE- and Aim-listed Kibo Energy rose by more than 7% and 3% on the JSE and LSE, respectively, on May 18, after the company announced that it had entered into an agreement with South Africa-based Industrial Green Solutions (IGES) to jointly develop a series of waste-to-energy projects in South Africa. The companies have established Newco, in which Kibo will hold a 65% interest and IGES the balance, to deliver the projects. The parties have set an initial target of generating more than 50 MW of electricity for sale to industrial users.
A new and far-reaching study of how to transition the global energy system to one with net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 highlights the need for a dramatic acceleration in the pace and scale of renewable-energy and grid investment, while simultaneously halting new fossil-fuel supply projects and abandoning any new unabated coal plants. Published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) as part of preparations for the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties, or COP26, climate gathering scheduled for Glasgow, Scotland, in November, the ‘Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector’ report concludes that the world has a viable, albeit narrow, pathway for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels.
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