The “just energy transition” to green energy and zero carbon is not only completely mad but highly unjust.
It will result in soaring electricity prices, increasing electricity failures, and massive environmental disruption. It will replace reliable electricity with unreliable electricity. It will cause an enormous increase in the materials required to produce electricity. It will see our lovely landscapes blighted with tens of thousands of gigantic machines of wind and solar power. It will bring about a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It will see South Africa suffering the same problems with energy supply now suffered by every country in the world that has moved heavily into wind and solar. South Africa, with a weak economy and a failing Eskom, will be far more damaged than rich countries have been. Our poor people will suffer most; the rich renewable energy companies will make fat profits; and the banks who fund them will be delighted.
From every quarter of the establishment, from our politicians, mainstream media, universities and big corporations, comes endless nonsense about the need for a zero-carbon economy and the claim that renewable electricity is cheaper than that from fossil fuels. Actually there no climate crisis and no need to reduce carbon emissions; and solar and wind will not reduce them. Germany, with its insane rush into wind and solar, is now the biggest emitter of CO2 in Europe. Throughout Western Europe, including Britain, electricity prices are rocketing thanks to solar and wind; this has shut down major industries and made it impossible for poor people to pay their electricity bills. Yet European politicians, including Boris Johnson, continue to shout for even more of these dreadful policies.
The only beneficiaries of the “just energy transition” will be the rich and the green. Green policies always favour the elite. Electric cars developed by Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, are very expensive but get large subsidies from governments (taxpayers). Even so, only the rich can afford them; so the poor man who cannot afford them has to subsidise the rich man who can. This says nothing about the environmental problems of the car batteries. In South Africa, solar and wind power will cause higher and higher final electricity prices, shutting down even more of our shrinking industry and manufacturing, and putting electricity beyond the reach of poor people (unless they steal it of course). But it will make juicy profits for rich wind and solar power companies from Germany and elsewhere. These profits rely on outrageous, guaranteed, long-term contracts; Eskom will be forced to buy very unreliable power whether it wants it or not (it usually doesn’t want it). The banks love these green deals because they guarantee mouth-watering returns for themselves. Our banks are pressing for more green energy and announcing piously that they will not fund any fossil fuel projects.
The greens love the “just energy transition” because they love control and coercion. They long to tell the vulgar masses how to live their lives. They want to see gargantuan wind turbines wherever you look, dominating the countryside, showing who is in charge now. They hate ordinary people choosing cheap energy; they want to force them to take expensive energy. In Europe the renewable power companies give lots of money to the greens to promote their shoddy products.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and Andre de Ruyter, the CEO of Eskom, are echoing all of this ruinous nonsense. Eskom has now got a “Just Energy Transition Office”. De Ruyter, who is doing the best job possible in fixing our old coal power stations, talks rubbish about our future electricity supply.
Let me give an example of the green madness of our Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Program (REIPPPP). Some years ago, Eskom, wanting to get onto the green bandwagon, planned to build a 100 MW solar Concentrated Solar Plant (CSP) plant near Upington in the Northern Cape. CSPs use the heat of the Sun. to make steam to drive a turbogenerator. The heat can be stored as a hot fluid in tanks to make electricity as required. CSP is the only solar and wind technology that can produce useful (reliable) electricity. But Eskom abandoned this plan because it calculated it would be too expensive. But then Independent Powers Produces did build such plants under REIPPPP. Sure enough, they were outrageously expensive, but Eskom was forced to buy their expensive electricity, sometimes costing over five times Eskom’s selling price. To make things even worse, Eskom was forced to pay for extremely expensive new transmission lines from the Northern Cape to deliver the expensive electricity it didn’t want.
Coal, which produces about 88% of our electricity, is very polluting but can be cleaned up to some extent. Gas is good but is at the mercy of volatile international markets, now asking very high prices. Nuclear is by far the best for our future, being clean, safe, reliable and affordable. Solar and wind are useless. The “just energy transition” is a cynical fraud.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay