Power to the people

Written by Charles Ash
Tuesday, 13 December 2011 15:35

The South African public was recently subjected to a rather bland and officious media address by Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane. She dutifully informed us of the COP-17/CMP7 conference which took place in Durban from 28 November to 9 December 2011. To most it all seemed to be a case of much ado about nothing. After all, most of us do our bit for energy conservation by diligently complying with the Eskom power alert warnings that flash on our screens every evening.

As tempting as blissful ignorance might be in environmental matters, we’ve long passed the point of no return – and wilful ignorance is no longer an option. Climate change is an inescapable reality and possibly our most stark and harrowing reminder that the modern world of ultra-connectivity and über-convenience that we so enjoy is not without its consequences. But how did we get here? Who is to blame? And more importantly, can we as a species fix our planet and restore it to its former, more rugged, natural and grandiose splendour?

To understand how we got to this dire situation where climate change threatens the very continuation of human civilisation as we know it, let’s start at the beginning. Back in the murky shadows of time, a curious, hairless and unique primate emerged that had developed a unique ability to manipulate and change its environment. Once Homo sapiens arrived on the scene with our big problem-solving brains, opposable thumbs and our desire to explore, Mother Nature has not rested much.

From our discovery of fire and our early ability to harness it to our invention of the wheel and ever-increasing ability to escape the punitive vagaries of Darwinian evolution, the human species has been on a path of perpetual and accelerating advancement, which has invariably placed us at loggerheads with nature and the natural order of things.

Taken from an orbiting satellite, a photo of the earth at night comes to mind. It would have to rank as one of the most beautiful ugly things we have ever seen. There in glorious photogenic splendour lie the various continents and land masses. No borders, no politics, just a consistent brightness around the most populous cities, with each city radiating the brilliant luminescence of human progress. On the one hand you feel pride in how we have conquered our natural environment and transcended our animalistic reliance on our physiology for our survival. For here, on a global scale, is evidence of how, instead of waiting for evolution to endow us with eyes that can see clearly in the dark, we invented the means with which to generate light on demand: the flip of a switch.

In contrast though, it’s also very easy to get the sense that there is something completely unnatural about the bright city lights piercing the darkness in this satellite image. The earth at night looks eerily like a biological host that is infected by harmful pathogens... human beings. While each bright spot when viewed from this distance represents millions of humans living seemingly innocuous lives in urban environments, it’s hard to shake the impression that the human condition with its technological progress is akin to a biological infection. Instead of humans being the custodians and caretakers of this fragile biosphere, we have virulently and relentlessly pillaged its resources and shamefully turned ourselves into what can only be described as the most advanced parasites on earth.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, human civilisations the world over have been powered primarily by fossil fuels, which are carbon-based, energy-rich compounds such as coal and oil, which when lit, release large amounts of heat and energy. That energy is then used to turn wheels of industry, generate electricity, power vehicles and drive economies. Besides energy, fossil fuels release enormous amounts of carbon-dioxide (CO2) in the process. CO2 is the primary gas responsible for climate change.

As fate would have it, in spite of our increasing technological prowess and capability, we are still constrained by the cause-and-effect gravitas encapsulated in pithy, trite sayings such as “play with fire and you will get burnt”.

No matter how you spin it, there’s an insidious injustice ingrained in the climate-change issue, its origins and its impact. There’s no denying that it is the world’s most industrialised and developed nations that are directly responsible for poisoning the earth’s atmosphere through their ravenous consumption of earth’s resources and scant regard for the environmental implications of their actions. The result, however, is that these nations now boast modern infrastructure and facilities, allowing their citizens to enjoy a significantly superior quality of life, health care and education.

When climate change manifests itself in freakish weather such as floods and droughts, the poorest parts of the world are of course most heavily affected. Flooding, for example, destroys infrastructure and homes and deprives already poor people of their meagre possessions. The aftermath is less infrastructure, more disease, more disarray and more human misery piled on top of the already rampant poverty.

Perhaps it isn’t altogether a bad thing that Africa has remained so woefully under-developed for so long. In 1997, a profoundly insightful paper entitled Information Technology in Africa: A Proactive Approach and the Prospects of Leapfrogging Decades in the Development Process posited a decidedly refreshing take on Africa’s under-development. Although the paper focused on internet and broadband technology, it certainly also holds true for technologies pertaining to energy generation. The paper argues that the rapid advancement of technologies in the past two decades have seen many first world countries embarking on extremely costly and frequent upgrade cycles as they endeavour to keep up with technology’s relentless march. As parts of Africa begin to rebuild themselves, the opportunity now exists for shrewd future-minded, progressive governments to put themselves on the right side of history by opting for technologies that will be beneficial to their long-term sustainability, from energy supply to water purification to broadband.

The United Nations Human Development Report of 2001 emphasises that electricity is essential to the rebuilding of Africa. Communication technologies, education, industrialisation, agricultural improvement and the expansion of municipal water systems all require access to abundant, reliable and cost-effective energy. Reliable electricity supply is something that has eluded most African countries for generations. Also, because fossil fuels are a finite and a rapidly depleting energy source, countries the world over are encouraged to invest in energy generation facilities such as solar power that are not as damaging to the environment as coal, oil or gas.

In South Africa, because of our large reserves of coal and the low cost of producing energy using coal-power plants, our national electricity supplier, Eskom, still uses it. Eskom is currently facing strong opposition from the global environmental-activist organisation Greenpeace for its building of the mammoth coal power plants Kusile and Medupi. Greenpeace contends that government is choosing expediency over long-term prudence in its choice of coal over green-energy alternatives, and when one looks at the Greenpeace dossier and case for green energy in South Africa (available on the Greenpeace website), they certainly have a point.

As South Africa emerges from its most bleak energy-supply period – in 2008, when the national electricity supply was severely compromised by staggering mismanagement and poor planning, culminating in rolling blackouts and massive public dissatisfaction – Eskom has been at pains to plug the holes. The company has commissioned the development of two massive coal power plants (Kusile and Medupi) while commissioning an even bigger wind and hydroelectric power facility in the Lesotho Highlands. In addition, government has been prudently rolling out solar geysers to all new RDP houses in an effort to reduce the strain on the national grid. Solar geysers are zero maintenance and provide up to a 60 percent saving on a typical household’s electricity bill. There is also an incentive programme with large rebates for people to replace their geysers with solar geysers in an effort to further reduce strain on the national grid and allow us to squeeze more life out of our ailing national electricity grid.

A pan-African electricity-generation project has been on the cards for many years, and although a priority project of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the project seems to be unable to graduate from the excessively protracted project-feasibility stage. The Grand Inga Dam project is a proposed hydroelectricity project that will see a large dam being built on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Upon completion, it will be able to generate in excess of 40 000 megawatts of renewable electricity, enough power to thrust Africa to the forefront of global green-energy generation and power even our most energy-hungry industrialisation plans. The project is unfortunately beset with challenges for a number of reasons, chiefly that the DRC is a known hotbed of extreme political instability, corruption and violence. The country’s historical antagonism and strained relations with some of its warring neighbours has seen the area languish at the very bottom of the human development pool, and despite successive elections and coups, the country seems to be caught up in an intractable internal conflict for which there is no easy end in sight.

The completion of this project, while vital to the wellbeing of the continent, hinges on far too many variables that threaten its completion and long-term viability. For the Grand Inga project to be a success, African nations will have to cooperate with each other on an unprecedented scale – and at best, with cognisance of our recent history, all we can muster is cautious optimism.

The unfortunate issue is that when it comes to electricity generation, there is no silver bullet or magic cure to the problem. Each one of the green-energy generation technologies in the world have various pros and cons that need to be carefully considered before a country begins to deploy it en masse. Outlined at the end of this article is a list of the three most popular and viable green-energy alternatives for Africa, with their associated pros and cons.

There is not a simple panacea for adopting green energy despite the fact that it is imperative that we do so. The clock is of course ticking, and humanity is operating on borrowed time. If we wish to mitigate the environmental disasters that escalating climate change is already unleashing on us, we need to create hybrid solutions. These will build on the benefits of the various green-energy options and provide solutions to the immediate problems.

The upside of the world’s energy crisis – the impending disaster of climate change and the urgency with which we need to find workable solutions – is an unlikely boon for humanity. It forces us to shed our notions of nationhood, statehood, sovereignty and citizenship to adopt a unifying and globally relevant perspective of the world. The climate crisis, like the threat of an inter-galactic alien species invading our planet, is forcing humanity to see itself as a united front with a shared biology and a common destiny. Our parochial notions of race, class and economic progress are set to be comprehensively challenged, debunked and the rules rewritten because our failure to do so would be nothing short of suicide. The really exciting part of this is that Africa stands to emerge from this climactic apocalypse as the world leader in sustainable development, the Cinderella continent that will beat the odds.

Photovoltaic

Photovoltaic is a method of generating electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct current electricity.

Pros:

• Sustainable
• Well suited to providing power in home or single-building applications
• Available all over the world
• Well-proven technology
• Non-polluting
• Tax incentives
• Low maintenance

Cons:

• Can take a large area to produce the energy needed
• Currently expensive
• Less energy on cloudy days, at higher latitudes
• No energy at night
• An energy storage device is required
• Negative aesthetics

Wind energy
Generating electricity through wind power, usually harnessed through turbines.

Pros:

• Sustainable
• Non-polluting
• Energy source is perpetual
• Low maintenance cost
• Well-proven technology

Cons:

• Unreliable, and strength depends on local weather patterns, temperature, time of year and location
• Equipment is expensive compared to other energy sources
• Initial expense is high
• Can have a negative impact on aesthetics
• Lack of highly specialised maintenance personnel

Hydroelectric power
Hydroelectricity is the term referring to the production of electric power through the use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water. It is the most widely used form of renewable energy.

Pros:

• Sustainable
• Non-polluting
• Flood control
• Damming creates reservoirs
• Recreational opportunities
• Low costs after initial start-up

Cons:

• Changes to natural river flows
• Degraded water quality
• Negative impact on fisheries such as blocking seasonal migration
• Ecosystem damage
• Requires flooding of large areas of land

Naomi Klein, global activist and author:

“Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well... We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down; we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite –fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful – the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity… respect the real limits to what the earth can take. I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society.”