SA is well positioned to take advantage of renewable energy technology, but a lack of political will and policy is hampering efforts to move to cleaner energy technologies, experts said at a recent Shell Energy Dialogue on innovation in managing the energy challenge.
"It's extremely frustrating for people on the technology side," Ernest van Dyk, director of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University's Centre for Energy Research said at the dialogue, which was hosted in association with Summit TV and the FM. "We know the technology works - there's no question about that - but one needs to convince the politicians that it's the right thing to do."
WHAT IT MEANS
 Plans on renewables need to kick in
Need to commit to financial incentives
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In 2003, recognising the need for a diversified energy mix, government published the White Paper on Renewable Energy. The driving force for diversification was the knowledge that, by 2005-2007, SA would be short of electricity supply capacity. The paper also recognised that harmful environmental emissions needed to be curbed - and that with its abundant energy sources, renewables were a sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels in SA.
To this end, government set a target of 10 000 GWh of renewable energy contribution to the country's final energy consumption by 2013 (equivalent to about 4% of the projected energy demand for 2013).
Today the drivers of renewable energy are more pressing. Though national treasury has shown commitment to the clean energy cause - this year announcing a 2c/kWh levy on nonrenewable electricity - action has been sluggish.
"There's a lot of lip-service paid to renewable energy, but there's not enough actual action," said the Sustainable Energy Society of Southern Africa's John Adams. "We're all doing research projects. We put up three windmills that came from Scotland that were taken down. They haven't worked incredibly well, so Eskom is saying it's not sure whether wind power works. It works in Germany: there are 20 000 MW of power going in there from wind."
For now, more action is needed to get renewables programmes off the ground. "If we take 4% growth currently, then by 2025 SA will need to double the amount we use at the moment," Nelson Mandela Bay Metro's Corrie Schmidt said.
In renewables' favour is the lead time it takes to get a plant up and running. According to the White Paper, conventional coal-fired power stations have a lead time of about five years, while renewables plants take about three years. Because power plants last for about 40 years, the move to cleaner energy sources makes sense in the global fight to limit greenhouse gas emissions standards.
But the development of alternative energy projects has not occurred at any great pace in SA, for numerous reasons - funding being one of them. "There's a scarcity of risk capital available to develop these projects," said Shanduka Energy MD Phuti Malabie. "The technology is there, the knowledge is there, but what we lack is entities or entrepreneurs who are actually prepared to risk capital to develop these projects."
On the whole, this is because of the low cost of electricity - according to the US's Energy Information Administration, electricity in SA cost US0,059c/kWh in 2006 compared with Germany's 0,222c/kWh.
"Given the prohibitive capital cost, the upfront capital costs, it becomes quite difficult to have a resultant energy tariff that is competitive," said Malabie. According to the August 2008 Renewable Energy Briefing Paper (part of Earthlife Africa's Energy & Climate Change Project), the capital cost of a grid-connected solar photovoltaic plant is about R40 000/kWh. In contrast, the cost of a new fossil-fuel powered base-load power station is about R17 500/kWh.
Government has recognised the financial hurdles to utilisation of renewables.
It's a question of creating a tariff structure system that encourages investment in renewable energy plants and sources while providing enabling legislation for generators to feed power back into the grid.
Germany, a world leader in renewable uptake, adopted feed-in legislation in the late 1990s. According to the policy, individual homeowners and other renewable energy generators feed electricity back into the national grid at preferential rates set for a 20-year period. The preferential rates would offset the higher costs of, and capital investments in, renewables and the additional costs would be redistributed to consumers. By 2008, the increase had amounted to $0,01/kWh.
"In Germany... once the politicians had been convinced in the early 2000s, that's when grid connections of alternative electricity systems really took off - and it's grown to unexpected proportions," said Van Dyk. Last year, 1 100 MW of solar power was installed on the roofs of houses in Germany.
Said panel moderator and dean of sciences at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Andrew Leitch: "Today, Germany's target is that by 2020, 20% of its energy consumption will be from renewable energy sources. That 20% is far more than we as a country are using at the moment. Each year, they are building the equivalent of one nuclear power station of energy - but it's not nuclear, it's wind."
Though systems of feeding power back into the national grid are commonplace in Europe, SA has yet to develop policy to allow for the implementation of feed-in tariffs and two-way grid connectivity. The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and university energy centre, however, have launched a pilot project to determine the technical, practical and policy implications of introducing such a system in SA.
"We have a project where we have a hybrid system that consists of a 1 kW photovoltaic array and a 1 kW wind turbine [installed in a standard dwelling]," said Van Dyk. "We've got the energy sources feeding into a control system that charges a battery, feeds the house and can also feed back into the grid.
"The system has been running for about two months now and the aim of the project is to look at technical issues related to grid-tied systems and the policy issues that are related to connecting any generator to the national utility."
It is hoped that the pilot project will be completed by the end of the year.
