The Presidential Climate Commission has objected to extending coal-fired power stations beyond their natural lifespan. (Waldo Swiegers/Getty Images)
About 100 people filled the Koornfontein Laerskool hall on 3 November last year to listen and respond to plans to decommission the Komati coal-fired power station in Mpumalanga.
There were many plans: to implode the four cooling towers; to keep certain buildings for a technical college; to install up to 150 megawatts of solar power where crop fields are; to install up to 70MW of wind turbines along the boundary of the Komati property; and a 150MW battery energy storage system.
There were maps and Eskom officials were present to explain the plans, according to a new report by environmental justice organisation groundWork, titled Contested Transition: State and Capital Against Community, the third in a sequence of reports focused on the just energy transition.
But there had been little consultation with the people who would be affected. In the report’s foreword, Bobby Peek, the director of groundWork, wrote: “In 2022, we chose to speak and listen to people who are living the transition. What is not a surprise is that it is not just. Indeed, we see many left on the waste heaps of an economy that feeds capital accumulation rather than what is promised in our celebrated constitution: a development that is ecologically sustainable and that seeks to promote ‘justifiable economic and social development’.”
Scared, outraged
The people in the hall were scared and outraged. They were worried about how they would earn money “after coal’, the report said. The coal mines around Komati had already started shutting down and people had lost jobs. They were not convinced that it was necessary to stop using coal. This transition was the agenda of overseas forces, they argued.
The report noted that the consultants said these questions were political and had no place in their meeting. “With some charity, the questions could be interpreted as concerning the socio-economic conditions, which was the subject of another report, and a completely different work stream and another set of consultants.”
That report, which was on socio-economic conditions, had been released the day before. One consultant said there had been discussions, “that is to say interviews and focus groups, with local households before the report was written, so how could people say they knew nothing about the transition?”
‘We don’t understand transition’
But according to groundWork’s report, that is the crux of the matter. The people who would be most affected by the transition said they did not understand what the just transition was, why it had to happen, how it would affect them and “they did not want it”.
What the people in the hall were confronted with was the outcome of an Eskom specific planning process. This had two parts: the plans for the decommissioning and repurposing of the power station, and the plans to deal with the socio-economic effect of the power station’s closure. Both were to fit into a broader, national process for which the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) was responsible, the report noted.
The PCC started work in February 2021, with representatives from a range of stakeholders, including residents, workers, trade unions and civil society, business and government to construct a national consensus and monitor the process.
This process was intended to bring South Africans to an understanding of the need for the transition, the pathways that it would follow and how to deal with people disadvantaged by the change, such as workers losing their jobs and the fate of businesses, including very small-scale informal businesses as local coal economies shut down. “In other words, what the fate of places like Komati would be.”
‘Exact opposite’
What was happening was the opposite of procedural justice as defined in the PCC’s Just Transition Framework, which puts people at the centre of decision-making, especially the poor, women, and youth, so that they could take advantage of new opportunities.
The transition, the report said, could not be run by “tick-box” environmental impact assessments that have been used to legitimise previous projects.
“When communities are not fully and timeously informed, when they are not engaged in the solutions, when consultants shield government from the people, and cannot give answers about what really concerns people, it cannot be called a fair process.”
Substantive justice only happens when the benefits and the burdens of the transition are shared fairly and transparently and this was not the case in Komati, according to the report.
First in the fleet
The nonprofit’s 263-page report describes how Komati, which started producing electricity in 1961, would be the first in the Eskom fleet to be decommissioned and repurposed. It would be followed in the next five years by Hendrina, Camden and Grootvlei stations.
Consultants said these power stations were old and breaking down, which led to load-shedding. It would be too expensive to fix them and to install scrubbers to bring the sulphur dioxide emissions within legal limits to protect the health of people living on the Highveld.
“In fact, the coal-fired power stations would have to be shut down as part of a deal with international climate financiers in which South Africa would drastically decarbonise its economy, starting with a transition of the coal-based electricity system to one based on renewable energy,” the report said.
Clear and present danger
The effects of climate change are escalating ahead of schedule, according to groundWork. The floods in April 2022 along the KwaZulu-Natal coast showed that climate change is a danger now, and that such floods will recur more often and with greater intensity.
The response showed that the government, from national to local levels, including eThekwini municipality, were not prepared for the 2022 floods despite prior experience. The slow disbursement of money, combined with corruption, resulted in displacement and suffering of many people, the report said.
Since 2019, the just transition debate has moved fast with the appointment of the PCC and the announcement of the Just Energy Transition Partnership between South Africa and the European Union, United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany at the United Nations 2021 climate talks. “It was also impelled by the ongoing collapse of Eskom and the uneven decline of the minerals energy complex centred on coal, as well as the shutdown of major crude oil refineries.”
According to the report, corporate South Africa looks for a just transition to “bail it out of dirty, dead end businesses and fix capital in bright new ‘green’ megaprojects, but without disturbing the underlying logic of the system”.
“Against that, communities want to see a just transition for all, one that upends unequal relations of power to transform the lives of ordinary people and make for a society founded on justice.”