MOSS L LEOKA | Electricity can only be solved by new power stations

The electricity crisis is bound to cost the ANC dearly in the general elections next year. That's how serious this matter is. Just in case some have forgotten how we got here, it was President Thabo Mbeki's government that failed to heed Eskom's warning years ago that the country needed to provide for refurbishing our ageing power stations and for building new ones.

That was nothing short of criminal, as our present power problems attest. But the greatest harm is to the economy. Companies are shutting down or relocating to other countries, with the resultant job losses adding to the already very high unemployment in the country.

Politicians must tell the truth that the current power problems can only be solved by the construction of new generation capacity. The new minister of electricity's every waking hour should be dedicated to achieving this objective. We need to build new power stations and fast.

We should approach the New Development Bank for loans to build at least six coal-fired power stations, each with a capacity of 3,000MW. These should be long-term (30 years), low-interest loans. I mention the NDB, as opposed to the IMF, because the latter should never be an option for a developing country such as ours.

I also refer to loans because, ideally, each one of these power stations should be ringfenced as a separate business entity. It would take about four years to build the stations, with thousands of jobs created during the construction phase. If we were to start the building process this year, the stations could be commissioned by early 2027 and our electricity problems would be history.

We have good quality coal in sufficient quantities in this country, plus we have the expertise to build coal-fired power stations. In the medium to longterm, we should add one or two nuclear power stations. Nuclear power is already in the department of energy's integrated resource plan anyway.

Our people are daily asking the government for an explanation of the way forward, to no avail. All they are asking for is for someone in government to say "this is what we are doing to solve the problem and this is how long it is going to take". One can be forgiven for thinking that the government has no plan beyond the appointment of the minister of electricity.

The $8bn (R147bn) grant from the G7 countries for the so-called "just transition" is for renewable power, which in our country can only mean solar and wind power. These will not solve our power problems because they are alleviative at best.

To function properly, a country needs to have baseload power. The intermittancy of the sun and wind renders solar and wind technologies incapable of delivering baseload power. We should be unabashed by using the abundant coal we have. After all, the Western countries used coal to develop their economies, plus they now seem to be reverting to coal to mitigate their current power crises occassioned by their boycotting Russian gas. Besides, our country's carbon footprint is small by comparison.

Moss L Leoka. Johannesburg