If you had a blank piece of paper and set out to design some kind of machine or system that could fix South Africa’s energy crisis, what criteria would you list?
Much of the list would be obvious: it should be low carbon, be able to work when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing and be cost effective.
It should be relatively quick to construct, be deployable where it is needed to reduce or eliminate transmission losses and should also be able to meet the needs of our energy-intensive economy.
Further, it should use related resources such as water wisely. If the product is exportable, that would be a bonus.
This would be a wonderful thing. Instead of having these monster coal furnaces belching carbon into the atmosphere, we’d have these relatively small plants set up where they are needed. They could supply the energy-hungry smelters with their own electricity, taking these beasts, which individually consume as much power as some of our larger cities, off the grid.
Other giant consumers of electricity (and producers of carbon emissions) such as Sasol could likewise get their needs supplied by this very clever machine.
It could, by itself, transform our economy from one of the most energy inefficient and carbon intensive to the most energy efficient and carbon neutral on the globe.
I mentioned water. Everyone knows the country is water challenged and that is likely to be an increasing issue as things get drier and hotter. Coal-fired power stations use vast amounts of water. It would be really cool if our machine could use little or no water or even contribute to our water resources, say by converting sea water into drinking water as part of its process. The babe I’m talking about is spec’d to turn 300 swimming pools of sea water into drinking water each day just from its waste heat.
It would be wonderful to have such technology and, actually, we do. It is called the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). We have spent about R8-billion developing it so far but three-quarters of its staff have just been paid off after government decided to chop its budget to nil.
For some people drawing up their own technology wish list, the PBMR would fail a key test. It is nuclear.
You get two kinds of people — those who think nuclear is the future and those who will never trust it under any circumstances. Their kids could be frying in the sun but they’d use coal rather than trust nuclear. When I say this I know full well that renewables have an important role to play but, for the time being, renewables are not by themselves going to power the kind of economy we are used to.
Let’s imagine that PBMR was already up and running. It would be the sexiest thing. We would not have an energy crisis. We would be rolling them out where they were needed. We would be taking smelters off grid. Countries would be queuing up to license and buy them. We’d be the greenest, coolest people in the world.
But PBMR is not up and running. It still has to be proved at commercial scale. A development facility has to be built at a reported cost of R20-billion. Large projects are subject to huge cost overruns — remember that Medupi started life as a R78-billion project that has now escalated to R140-billion or thereabouts — so the actual cost may be more like R40-billion, a lot of money for a developing country to spend on unproved technology.
But here’s the problem. If the economy was firing on all cylinders we could afford to run an ambitious research and development programme, funding select projects such as the PBMR.
But we’re not running on all cylinders. Eskom, for instance, has messed up its coal contracts and so is sucking more and more money that we could be investing in the future, such as in the PBMR.
The state is being called to put oodles of cash into building new coal-fired power stations while the private sector with private money stands on the sidelines, desperately trying to be noticed.
The privately financed Mmamabula project in Botswana has decided, out of frustration, to scale back its 1 400MW plant to just 300MW for use in Botswana because it cannot get a supply agreement with us.
So the state pumps billions into Eskom when private money should be doing the job. Would its money not be better spent investing in the energy of the future?
Government, by its own acknowledgement, has contributed to the energy crisis by doing too little too late. An unintended victim now appears to be the PBMR. It was always going to be a controversial project because it is nuclear and because it is unproved technology, but with gross domestic product in excess of R2,6-trillion and if we are managing things well, it is not beyond our capacity.
Department of public enterprises spokesperson Ayanda Shezi says no final decision has been taken on the future of the PBMR. She says a task team is reviewing all options and will take proposals to Cabinet later this year for a final decision to be made, adding: “The downscaling of the company is to preserve remaining funds until a final decision is made.”
Shezi says government’s original funding allocation required that PBMR attract additional investment from investors other than government and that it secure a customer for its product, both of which it has been unable to do, despite its revised business model and product offering. No funding has been allocated to PBMR beyond March 2010, she says.
It is understood that PBMR has enough funds to run until the end of the year and that it would have completed its design work by then. Its supporters believe that it is the technology of the future and that PBMR plants will, in time, become commonplace around the globe, if not in South Africa.
One supporter points to a March 8 announcement this year from the United States, saying it has budgeted $40-million for the conceptual design to develop the next generation nuclear plant. It said the results of this work will help the administration decide whether to proceed with the construction and demonstration of such a plant.
“If successful, the demonstration project will demonstrate high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology that will be capable of producing electricity as well as process heat for industrial applications and will be configured for low technical and safety risk with highly reliable operations,” the statement says.
“About 16% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial process heat applications. The process heat or steam generated by the high-temperature nuclear reactors could be used for highly efficient electricity co-generation, which has the potential to help energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical producers, reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”
o PBMR spokesperson Lorna Skhosana said this week that the PBMR expects to get $10-million in funding from 15% shareholder Westinghouse. Skhosana said the funds made available by Westinghouse would be over and above the funds it currently has, which will allow it to operate until the end of the year.