Author Archive for: Engineering News

Carbon prices have tumbled in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, decoupling from the broader energy complex, despite the steep rise in gas prices, which should have incentivised gas-to-coal switching, raising emissions and so driving up the demand for European emissions allowances (EUAs), says research organisation Fitch Solutions. From a peak of €96/t carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) on February 8, to their trough at €58/t CO2e on March 7, EUAs lost about 40% of their value, the agency states.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) Council has agreed, in principle, to divestment from fossil fuels, including divesting its endowment formally from the fossil fuel industry. This approach will put back into society, the environment and the global economy more than is being taken out, the council says.

With resurgent warnings about load-shedding potentially increasing as high as Stage 8 and the possibility of fuel rationing in the domestic market, the Institute for Risk Management South Africa’s (Irmsa’s) ‘Risk Report’ for 2022 states that the South African economy is in for serious energy risks.

Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer recently confirmed that the State-owned power utility was using nine-million litres of diesel a day at its open-cycle gas turbines in order to avoid load-shedding or to keep load-shedding at lower levels while its coal fleet is struggling to meet supply.

Global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie is confident that sub-Saharan Africa offers an alternative vision of how the energy transition can change power generation.

“The evolution of sub-Saharan Africa’s utility business model, both on and off the grid, will fundamentally reshape the trajectory of global electricity demand and will be essential to the energy transition.

Indebted State-owned power utility expects running costs for its diesel-fed turbines, which are used to keep the lights on when coal-powered plants break down, to surge as it struggles to keep up with maintenance. Eskom Holdings sees about a third of its coal-fired capacity being unavailable at any one time under a most likely scenario, it said last week in a presentation to the National Economic Development and Labour Council, which groups business, government and labor union representatives. That would require it to spend R20.9-billion on fueling its open-cycle gas turbines in the 13 months through April next year, or almost three times what it spent in the financial year ended March last year.