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SO, MY fellow South Africans, here we are, load-shedding again. Hoo boy. And since Eskom’s website is so effective (not) that I can’t find out if my area is scheduled to lose power any time soon, don’t be alarmed if I suddenly disapp---
Just joking.
At the end of February, I spent a week in Denmark, a country where the streets are clean, cyclists are a traffic priority (Copenhagen has more than 40 km of cycle lanes and about a third of all trips to work and school are done by bike), and most things work (I say most things – I am very aware that Denmark is not the perfect little country it would like to be seen as, but on the other hand, far more things work than in South Africa).
I was with two other South African journalists, as well as journalists from Ghana and Kenya, all of us guests of International Media Support, an organisation begun in 2001 to support local media in countries “affected by armed conflict, human insecurity and political transition”, according to the website.
We were there to look at how Denmark combines environmental goals with economic growth, as well as Danish organisations and companies working on similar goals in Africa – after all, environmental degradation is a huge and growing contributor to ‘human insecurity’ on this continent.
Denmark is never likely to see the kind of load-shedding havoc we’re experiencing. In the early 1970s, during the Opec oil crisis, the country embarked on a renewable energy policy to make it relatively independent of imported fossil fuels and which has not wavered since, whatever the ideologies of the government at any time.
This early start has made it an example of how wind power can be introduced into the power mix and fill a significant part of the country’s needs. Everywhere you go outside the big cities you see turbines, some of them already 20 years old and due for replacement. Their blades tumble slowly in the breeze as they feed into the national grid – by the end of 2012, a third of the power consumed by Danes came from these turbines.
Denmark’s goal is to be completely fossil fuel-free by 2050. To this end, they’ve embarked on a number of other strategies which encourage small and medium-sized enterprises to generate energy they can feed back into the grid.
We visited a pig farmer, Erik Broholm Andersen, in the Jutland region, whose 20 000 pigs yield bio-materials (he said discreetly) which are converted into biogas which powers a generator that feeds energy back into the grid. (Since the farm’s name is Boel, I couldn’t help saying it was all Boel s**t!)
We also – and very relevantly – visited a company called SystemTeknik, where the regional manager for India, Middle East and Africa, Prabhakar Tunuguntia, enthusiastically told us about the company’s micro-power plants, which have been pioneered in places like Greenland.
Currently the company is doing a pilot in rural Uganda, in a village of about 200 houses that is off the grid. SystemTeknik’s micro-power solutions will combine whatever renewable sources of energy are available – hydro, wind or solar – to generate power, some of which is stored in a battery.
The company is working with the World Wide Fund for Nature in Uganda – the NGO wants to save forests, and that means providing people with sources of energy aside from wood and charcoal.
As the load-shedding news came in, and I heard the first close-to-tears small businessman on the radio, my mind went back to the micro-power solution. I thought about how useful it would be to have, say, suburb-by-suburb systems like this.
And then I thought about how good it would be if we had focused on wind power long ago, and installed a bunch of turbines across the country (so that when the wind drops in one area, another will start feeding power in, as it works in Denmark) and subsidised solar panels on all new developments… gosh, we could have used that R30.8bn that was misspent in 2012 alone, never mind all the money that sank without trace into corruption!
But you know what? The Danes ring-fenced this issue from politics in the 1970s; they made it a national priority which everyone understood and bought into (the pig farmer told us his frighteningly expensive biogas installation was his contribution to green growth in Denmark, for example).
By 1998, the year I recall writing about renewable energy in Eskom, they had a track record of 25 or so years; at the same time, Eskom had a renewables department that consisted, if memory serves, of two people (count them – one, two), which clearly indicated South Africa’s drive and commitment – ha ha.
Time to change all that, methinks. When Starbucks is worried that climate change has started to seriously affect coffee supplies; when Nestlé has a programme to help cocoa farmers adapt to climate change for the same reason; and when American restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill warns that climate change means the ingredients for its guacamole might not be reliable enough to continue production, you know it’s something we have to take seriously.
Why can’t we commit to stop expanding coal-fired power in favour of our abundant supply of wind and sun, which can be quickly and relatively inexpensively (compared to Medupi) brought into play as part of the mix that feeds the grid?
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
Just joking.
At the end of February, I spent a week in Denmark, a country where the streets are clean, cyclists are a traffic priority (Copenhagen has more than 40 km of cycle lanes and about a third of all trips to work and school are done by bike), and most things work (I say most things – I am very aware that Denmark is not the perfect little country it would like to be seen as, but on the other hand, far more things work than in South Africa).
I was with two other South African journalists, as well as journalists from Ghana and Kenya, all of us guests of International Media Support, an organisation begun in 2001 to support local media in countries “affected by armed conflict, human insecurity and political transition”, according to the website.
We were there to look at how Denmark combines environmental goals with economic growth, as well as Danish organisations and companies working on similar goals in Africa – after all, environmental degradation is a huge and growing contributor to ‘human insecurity’ on this continent.
Denmark is never likely to see the kind of load-shedding havoc we’re experiencing. In the early 1970s, during the Opec oil crisis, the country embarked on a renewable energy policy to make it relatively independent of imported fossil fuels and which has not wavered since, whatever the ideologies of the government at any time.
This early start has made it an example of how wind power can be introduced into the power mix and fill a significant part of the country’s needs. Everywhere you go outside the big cities you see turbines, some of them already 20 years old and due for replacement. Their blades tumble slowly in the breeze as they feed into the national grid – by the end of 2012, a third of the power consumed by Danes came from these turbines.
Denmark’s goal is to be completely fossil fuel-free by 2050. To this end, they’ve embarked on a number of other strategies which encourage small and medium-sized enterprises to generate energy they can feed back into the grid.
We visited a pig farmer, Erik Broholm Andersen, in the Jutland region, whose 20 000 pigs yield bio-materials (he said discreetly) which are converted into biogas which powers a generator that feeds energy back into the grid. (Since the farm’s name is Boel, I couldn’t help saying it was all Boel s**t!)
We also – and very relevantly – visited a company called SystemTeknik, where the regional manager for India, Middle East and Africa, Prabhakar Tunuguntia, enthusiastically told us about the company’s micro-power plants, which have been pioneered in places like Greenland.
Currently the company is doing a pilot in rural Uganda, in a village of about 200 houses that is off the grid. SystemTeknik’s micro-power solutions will combine whatever renewable sources of energy are available – hydro, wind or solar – to generate power, some of which is stored in a battery.
The company is working with the World Wide Fund for Nature in Uganda – the NGO wants to save forests, and that means providing people with sources of energy aside from wood and charcoal.
As the load-shedding news came in, and I heard the first close-to-tears small businessman on the radio, my mind went back to the micro-power solution. I thought about how useful it would be to have, say, suburb-by-suburb systems like this.
And then I thought about how good it would be if we had focused on wind power long ago, and installed a bunch of turbines across the country (so that when the wind drops in one area, another will start feeding power in, as it works in Denmark) and subsidised solar panels on all new developments… gosh, we could have used that R30.8bn that was misspent in 2012 alone, never mind all the money that sank without trace into corruption!
But you know what? The Danes ring-fenced this issue from politics in the 1970s; they made it a national priority which everyone understood and bought into (the pig farmer told us his frighteningly expensive biogas installation was his contribution to green growth in Denmark, for example).
By 1998, the year I recall writing about renewable energy in Eskom, they had a track record of 25 or so years; at the same time, Eskom had a renewables department that consisted, if memory serves, of two people (count them – one, two), which clearly indicated South Africa’s drive and commitment – ha ha.
Time to change all that, methinks. When Starbucks is worried that climate change has started to seriously affect coffee supplies; when Nestlé has a programme to help cocoa farmers adapt to climate change for the same reason; and when American restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill warns that climate change means the ingredients for its guacamole might not be reliable enough to continue production, you know it’s something we have to take seriously.
Why can’t we commit to stop expanding coal-fired power in favour of our abundant supply of wind and sun, which can be quickly and relatively inexpensively (compared to Medupi) brought into play as part of the mix that feeds the grid?
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
