Mix(ed) messages

It’s time for South Africa to interrogate its policy of pursuing a so-called ‘energy mix’, which may sound reasonable, but which has become little more than a convenient fig leaf for policy incoherence and confusion.

True, it’s dangerous to pick winners and losers. It’s equally dangerous, though, to try and be all things to all people.

Ultimately, policymaking is about choices and when those choices are not made the consequences can be serious and long lasting, particularly in a sector such as energy that underpins all economic activity.

Two recent developments highlight the risks.

First, there was the recent nuclear summit, convened by the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, which remains in place while the process of unbundling the departments of electricity and energy, and minerals and petroleum resources continues.

At the event, participants were told that objections to new nuclear were “unscientific”. That may well be true when it comes to whether the technology is able to produce low-emission electricity (which it does) and do so relatively safely (which it also does).

The same does not hold, however, for whether there is currently a technoeconomic case for adding new nuclear to the South African electricity mix.

Not one of the all too few Integrated Resource Plans published since 2010 has included new nuclear as a least-cost option. The technology’s inclusion has always been the result of a ‘policy adjustment’, underpinned by government’s view that new nuclear is beneficial despite its higher costs.

The second was the signing of an agreement between Eskom and Sasol to jointly explore options for anchoring, through gas-to-power (GtP) generation, yearly domestic gas demand at a level higher than the current 180 PJ so as to improve the commercial prospects for importing liquefied natural gas.

The partnership is framed as an emergency initiative to avert a pending ‘gas cliff’, which has been officially delayed by a year to mid-2027, but which still looms large for the industrial customers reliant on gas imports from depleting fields in southern Mozambique.

Government argues that GtP “must be part of the mix” to complement variable renewables, but again offers no technoeconomic, let alone climate-aligned, case, nor a comparison of the other possible technologies that could fulfil that role, notably battery energy storage.

It is possible that GtP will be the most appropriate and affordable solution to help close the gaps that will arise when the sun is not shining, and the wind isn’t blowing.

Yet, as with new nuclear, which admittedly will find the role of ‘gap filler’ far more challenging, there is no official technoeconomic modelling to prove the argument. Instead, South Africans are meant to be placated by the increasingly banal ‘energy mix’ argument.

In a context where the tools are readily available to stress-test such propositions, there are no longer any excuses for the current lack of energy policy coherence and vision.

While it persists, so will our suboptimal energy choices and outcomes.