Author Archive for: Engineering News

As South Africa takes its first steps towards a just transition and as decarbonisation becomes a strategic imperative for heavy electricity users, the role of energy storage and hybrid technologies is becoming more relevant, says law firm Allen & Overy South Africa.

Electricity storage paired with renewable energy generation can contribute to many of the challenges faced by the country’s electricity infrastructure.

New Republic of (South) Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol (inaugurated on Tuesday) is committed to his policy of strengthening the country’s nuclear power sector, reversing his predecessor’s policy (adopted in 2017) of phasing nuclear power out. Investing in nuclear energy formed part of the platform on which Yoon fought the election. The President’s position was reaffirmed by his nominee for the post of Industry Minister, Lee Chang-yang, during his parliamentary confirmation hearing. “I will seek measures to reasonably utilize nuclear energy, which is a major means of energy security and carbon neutrality, and to boost the competitiveness of the sector to actively support its exports,” he affirmed.

Building big, conventional nuclear power plants is slow and expensive. That’s one reason the industry is staking its future on a new generation of smaller advanced reactors. Still in development, these offer the promise of carbon-free energy and could back up the ebbs and flows of renewable power in clean grids of the future. As Russia’s war in Ukraine galvanizes Western countries to break their reliance on Russian energy exports, in part by accelerating green technologies that will replace fossil fuels, one solution could be boosting the deployment of nuclear energy. Advanced nuclear startup Oklo Inc. says it could build a new plant in about one year. It wouldn’t be big, but it could be ready quickly if the US was willing to fast-track the regulatory process, said Oklo’s CEO Jacob DeWitte.

A record 295 GW of new renewables capacity was installed globally in 2021 and the International Energy Agency (IEA) is forecasting that installations will rise to about 320 GW this year, despite elevated costs for both solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind. Solar PV is forecast to account for 60% of the 2022 increase, with the commissioning of 190 GW, which would represent a 25% year-on-year gain. The technology is also on course to reach yearly installations of 200 GW in 2023.

New infrastructure was just as vulnerable to climate change as ageing infrastructure, said South African Local Government Association (Salga) senior climate change adviser Slindile Maphumulo on May 10. She explained that, while ageing infrastructure was vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed during extreme weather events, new infrastructure was equally at risk as a result of being built poorly, slowly or not at all owing to poor tender systems, the appointment of incompetent service providers and contractors, black economic empowerment systems, inexperienced engineers and, most of all, rampant corruption.