Melanie Gosling
Environment Writer
THE government’s rush to sign a nuclear deal this year was unnecessary and unwise as South Africa did not need 10 Gigawatts of new electricity, UCT energy policy expert Hilton Trollip said yesterday.
There were also cheaper and quicker options to provide baseload power than nuclear.
Speaking at a seminar organised by the Institute for Security Studies about the SA nuclear programme, Trollip, from UCT’s Energy Research Centre, said the government was basing its push for nuclear on an outdated electricity planning document – the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) of 2010.
However, the updated IRP compiled in 2013, with revised electricity demand projections, said no nuclear baseload capacity was needed by 2025 if there was a high electricity demand, and not until 2030 if there was a lower demand.
This updated document, however, had been pushed aside and government was working from the outdated document. In March 2014 the updated IRP 2013 plan had been published and the need for nuclear was questioned. “The big question not being asked is do we need nearly 10GW of nuclear now? An objective analysis, based on data, is we don’t need 10GW of new baseload power by 2025,” Trollip said. The country may need to consider nuclear in the future, but all the evidence questioned the wisdom of rushing into nuclear now. Trollip said Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson was on record as saying the reason for going ahead with buying 9.6GW of nuclear power “at speed” by the end of the year was because there was no alternative to nuclear as baseload.
“That is nonsense. There are alternatives. We did recent modelling which shows that we can have a growing mining and minerals economy without nuclear power,” Trollip said.
Cheaper and quicker baseload options included offshore gas and hydro power. There were also the new coal power stations due to come online.
The updated plan’s electricity demand projections were also lower than those of the 2010 document, and electricity consumption had indeed fallen over the last few years. Statistics SA showed that South Africa had used less electricity in 2014 than it had in 2007.
Trollip said whenever the energy research centre asked for the data and evidence from those who said it was imperative to build nuclear now, they were never able to produce it.
The cost of the proposed nuclear programme at a very low estimate was R400 billion to R500bn, and at a high estimate R1.3 trillion. Trollip said this was about one-third of South Africa’s GDP.
Judith February, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said the government’s secrecy around the nuclear deal was unconstitutional as the constitution required that all government procurement be “fair, equitable, competitive, cost-effective and transparent”.
The Department of Energy was asked to comment, but had not replied at the time of going to press.