Speaking at the DLO Africa Power Roundtable event in Sandton, hosted by law firm Webber Wentzel in April, then Energy Minister Jeff Radebe emphasised that Eskom on its own could not supply the R1 trillion of investment required in power generation, transmission and distribution needed by 2030, under the government’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). That scale of debt obviously leads to liquidity challenges and seriously hamstrings the country’s ability to add new electricity connections or support local economic growth. The same month brought confirmation that state power utility Eskom was creaking under a debt of R435 billion (representing some 15% of SA’s total sovereign debt). In February, the Department of Water and Sanitation told a ministerial interactive session on transformation that, without intervention, the country faces a deficit of an estimated 3 000 billion litres of water per year by 2030. South Africa – despite its bright yellow lights and many rivers is no exception. In the north, Europe is lush, green and well irrigated while Sub-Saharan Africa is a dry, yellow continent where droughts and water shortages have long been a fact of life. Switch that god’s eye view to the daytime, and it’s a similar story when it comes to water. Surrounded by energy wealth, most Africans still wonder why their countries are so power poor.’ All of this is outside Africa’s huge reserves of coal and gas, which can provide some of the continent’s cheapest electricity. Yet the continent is rich in energy resources, with well over 10 TW of solar potential, 350 GW of hydroelectric potential, 110 GW of wind potential, and an additional 15 GW of geothermal potential. ‘Over 645 million Africans lack access to electricity.
‘With the lowest power consumption per capita in the world, Sub-Saharan Africa is arguably the darkest section of the global village, with investments, social and economic growth and job creation hobbled by frequent outages, load shedding and total blackouts,’ Amadou Hott, the AFDB’s vice president for energy at the time, writes in a recent online post. Below that lies Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that – with a few bright yellow exceptions around Gauteng and the Niger river delta – seems blanketed in blue darkness. Up top there’s Europe and the Mediterranean outline of North Africa, all lit up and sparkling. Satellite images of the Earth at night tell a story of two worlds. While SMEs may not have the capital to invest in large scale energy saving projects, they can implement measures that are more modest yet still worthwhile.
0 kommentar(er)
