South Africa has experienced power shortages with rolling blackouts on an unprecedented scale in 2022. This state of affairs is largely due to technical failures at its ageing fleet of coal power plants. The present power generation shortage is due to the power utility Eskom’s failure to add sufficient new electricity generation to the grid. This meant that it had to keep ailing old power stations going beyond their projected life span. The coal plants are prone to frequent renewed breakdown. In addition, their maintenance and parts replacements are becoming prohibitively expensive. Given the major contribution that the burning of coal makes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, electricity generation from coal is in any case globally viewed as extremely problematic, with major pressure and incentives to scale this down.
South Africa is currently ranked eighth in the world in terms of the total amount of coal used for electricity generation. This is based on country-by-country global statistics on coal power generation. The statistics are produced on an annual basis and are widely available. The largest coal user by far is China, followed by India, though these are also the world’s most populous nations. In terms of energy consumption from coal per capita, South Africa also ranks among the highest in the world with just under 16,500 kWh per person per annum This is in line with other highly coal dependent countries. It is roughly on par with China, South Korea and Australia and slightly lower than the top three – Estonia, Kazakhstan and Taiwan.
When it comes to dependency on coal power plants, South Africa is in a class of its own – 85% of its electricity is produced in coal power plants. This is way higher than all countries – bar two. Only Mongolia and Kosovo have a higher dependency. They have tiny populations – Mongolia has just over 3 million people, Kosovo just under 2 million. South Africa’s population is over 60 million.
South Africa’s percentage of electricity from coal has decreased only marginally – by 9 percentage points – since 1985. This is in contrast to other previously coal dependent countries that have made much more dramatic moves to carbon-free power. For example, the UK got 58% of its electricity from coal in 1985. Today this is down to 2%, partly thanks to massive investments in wind power.
South Africa has climatic conditions suitable for solar and wind power, and should in theory similarly be able to reduce its coal dependence. A drive towards low-carbon electricity generation however requires governmental support, which has mostly not been forthcoming in the last decade.
The history
As it’s a country with rich coal deposits, South Africa’s proliferation of coal plants was to be expected in the 1970s and 1980s. Because it’s also a water scarce country, possibilities for hydropower plants were always limited. And while one nuclear plant was constructed, the increasing isolation of apartheid-era South Africa made it difficult to access international expertise needed for further nuclear developments. Renewable technologies are relatively new. They only became commercially competitive about 10 years ago, and were not considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels before then. When the need for more power generation in South Africa became apparent in the first years of the millennium, a time when the electrification of previously unconnected communities was booming, the choice was made to construct two further coal plants, Medupi and Kusile. These builds have, however, proved technologically flawed, way over budget and badly behind schedule. When the first series of rolling power cuts had to be implemented in 2007, it became clear that energy security planning and implementation had gone wrong. The subsequent electricity plan from 2010 recommended major developments in nuclear and renewable energy.
In 2015 the government stalled the construction of planned new solar and wind plants in favour of a highly controversial and ultimately blocked nuclear deal with Russia. Since the resumption of the renewables electricity programme in 2018 some wind and solar plants have been built, but at nowhere near the rate needed to dent the dominant role of coal.
There are loud calls, also supported by influential individuals within the ruling African National Congress party, to maintain South Africa’s coal-intensive trajectory. The proponents argue that the coal power stations can simply be managed better, and that any new power generation should mainly be focused on nuclear and gas.
The opposing view is that South Africa should align with the global trends to massively develop new solar and wind power plants. Its advocates justify this option by pointing to the lower cost of these technologies, short project completion times and environmental considerations. Despite enjoying weather conditions that are superbly suited for wind and solar farms, South Africa has been extremely slow to kickstart its renewable energy generating infrastructure.
South Africa could have followed the example of China. Although the largest user of coal in the world, it is already making major moves towards a far lower carbon footprint. Over the five year period 2021-2025, China plans to add solar and wind plants producing 570 GW of electricity. To put this figure into perspective, this is roughly ten times South Africa’s present total power capacity.
Next steps
The office of the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, comes across as sympathetic to mass renewable energy developments. It has aligned itself with the recently published Just Energy Transition Investment Plan. The plan envisages accelerated building of more wind and solar farms to replace decommissioned coal power stations. It also tries to mitigate lowered economic activity and job losses in the coal fields and adjacent coal plants. It goes further in exploring energy exports in the form of green hydrogen, an energy storage medium fed by renewables, and the current global move towards electric vehicles. If supported and implemented, the plan will result in better power supply in only three to five years from now. This however presupposes that the government will rally behind this initiative and work together rather than sending contradictory messages.
In the interim, power shortages will persist in South Africa.
Courtesy: The Conversation. Hartmut Winkler is a Professor of Physics, University of Johannesburg
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Planet vs. Plastics” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.
As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook, which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.
Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.
Felix Richter is a Data Journalist
This article was first published in the Statista.com.
Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
Edward Armstrong is a postdoctoral research fellow, University of Helsinki
A new draft text on global stocktake has been published at the UN climate summit, COP28 UAE, on Wednesday morning. While the draft text does not contain the words “phase out”, it includes reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The text published by the UN’s climate body calls on parties to accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions worldwide with a focus on reducing methane emissions by 2030. “We all want to get the most ambitious outcome possible,” Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 Director-General, said on Tuesday.
The text, published early Wednesday, does not specifically refer to oil, but mentions the need to ‘phase-down’ coal. It says that it recognises the need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to global efforts.
Among those efforts it recognises the need to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by the same date. It also recognises the need to accelerate the phase-down of coal and accelerate towards net zero energy systems, utilising zero or low carbon fuels by mid century.
While the document does not mention oil or combustion engines, it does recognises the need for accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles. It also recognises the need to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
Finance specifics
On the subject of finance, the document said developed countries should continue to take the lead in mobilising climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.
Such mobilisation of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts, the text said. It may provide small comfort to campaigners from developing countries who implored Parties to begin the phase out of fossil fuels and provide vastly improved access to funding for renewables.
The document highlights the persistent gap and challenges in technology development and transfer and the uneven pace of adoption of climate technologies around the world.
It further urges Parties to address these barriers and strengthen cooperative action, including with non-Party stakeholders, particularly with the private sector, to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing technologies, the fostering of innovation and the development and transfer of new technologies.
It also emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by many developing country Parties in accessing climate finance and encourages further efforts, including by the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, to simplify access to such finance, in particular for those developing country Parties that have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States.
