S-Af: Energy-crisis myths, misrepresentations and fallacies

A fundamental and poorly understood characteristic of the electricity-supply industry is that large quantities of electricity, the quantities needed to supply big cities and heavy industry, cannot be economically stored. It must be manufactured at the same time and in the same quantities as it is being used. Turning something off does not allow electricity to be saved and made available later. It simply means less electricity has to be generated now, but it will have to be generated when the load is turned back on.

Another poorly understood issue is the magnitude of the loads and the capacity of the generating plant needed to power a modern economy. Renewable resources are at present unable to provide power on the scale that it is needed for many purposes. Nine hundred large wind turbines would be needed to match more or less the output of the Koeberg nuclear power station. The Western Cape at present uses more power in peak periods than two Koebergs can produce. The balance is imported from stations in Mpumalanga via Eskom’s 400kV transmission lines.
The wind turbines needed to meet this load would probably occupy more than 2 000ha of land, and they only work at full capacity when a good, strong breeze is blowing. You cannot place them too close to each other or one behind another because they affect each other. And, of course, you cannot store their output for use when the weather is calm.

When it comes to solar panels used to generate electricity, not to be confused with solar water heaters, it is definitely no contest. Nearly 2 000ha or 20 square kilometres of solar panels would be needed to match Koeberg’s output. They produce direct current at low voltages, and expensive inverters would be needed to turn that into the alternating current necessary for economical transmission and distribution. And then, what do you do at night? Remember you cannot store electricity economically in large quantities.

So where do we go from here? It’s a big problem, which reminds me of the story of the traveller asking for directions and being told: “You can’t get there from here.”

We are not the only country needing to build new, large-capacity power stations urgently. The additional capacity we need over the next two decades pales into insignificance compared with the needs of countries such as China and India. An international shortage of skilled artisans and engineers is making it difficult to recruit skilled staff and easy for existing technical staff to find lucrative employment elsewhere at highly competitive salaries. Insisting on meeting racial quotas and applying preferential procurement and promotion policies is not helpful.

Thought Leader