Renewables are not today’s fix to SA’s loadshedding woes

For the past two decades renewable energy’s potential has captivated minds and spurred the imagination. Renewable energy is today what the personal computer was for the 1980s: the next frontier. This is best exemplified by the billions of dollars invested by venture capitalists into thousands of renewable energy start-ups that emerge each year, together with the litany of speeches made by presidents and CEOs across the world about net zero by 2050 and the importance of a clean-energy transition.

What you probably don’t hear about, however, is the great strides Africa is making in the run-up to this “green revolution”. Just as with the cellular phone, renewable energy may present Africa with the opportunity to leap past traditional fossil-based infrastructure and ring in an era of green technology. Well, in theory anyway.

According to the International Energy Agency, more than 95% of people without electricity live in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Access to energy, we know, has a direct and positive correlation to upward social mobility and quality of life. Renewable energy sources offer an alternative to connect millions to the grid — or to make them independent of it.

However, it’s more complicated than the renewables lobby would have us believe. A key consideration is that the energy deficit in SA is so vast that even if every single one of the planned renewable projects with investment already allocated to them was up and running, there is no way renewable energy alone could meet the existing need.

McKinsey corroborates this in its report “The future of African oil and gas: Positioning for the energy transition”, stating that in the next two decades rapid population growth and industrialisation will drive strong energy demand growth in Africa — including fossil fuels — pegging African energy demand in 2040 at 30% higher than today, compared with an expected 10% global energy demand increase in the same period.

According to a 2016 Moody’s report, SA had built more than $7bn (about R110bn) worth of renewable energy infrastructure using private money in four years. This made it the fastestgrowing renewable energy sector in the world at that time. This achievement appeared to underline the success of SA’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement (REIPPP) programme, and its potential to solve the country’s energy crisis.

Fast-forward to the present. Unfortunately, the evidence that renewables are the fix to loadshedding woes is overwhelmingly to the contrary. That is not to say renewables don’t have a place in a wide-ranging and realistic energy mix, but the fact is they can only be a contributor to rather than the solution.

Another consideration affecting renewables viability in the medium term is that the integration into the national grid infrastructure has been a source of great frustration for utilities globally. At the Enlit Africa conference, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter affirmed that “grid access is the biggest constraint to rapidly connecting new sources of power generation”.

Even for developed economies, the intermittent nature of renewable energy supply has regularly resulted in system imbalances and issues with frequency controls. Germany, which has championed renewables in Europe, has even been forced to pay wind producers not to generate power to maintain grid stability.

And with Germany in mind, the war in Ukraine has been a major indicator of just how dependent European “greener” economies are on gas, rather than renewable technologies, to deliver reliable energy solutions to their citizens. New sources of gas supply, not renewables, is where the focus now lies. And this is a huge opportunity for Africa, as the world turns away from Russian gas in pursuit of other sources. It’s not surprising then that at the recent 2022 German-Africa Energy Forum in Hamburg, Africa’s abundant reserves of oil and gas, and how to leverage them, were the focus of discussions.

Struggling African economies may just find themselves on the front foot for once, as custodians of a critical resource — even if it is a

“fossil fuel”. With the revenue opportunity this could present, it is unlikely that any planned renewables programmes will supersede the potential of an emerging gas market. Renewables will, of course, remain important in terms of managing investor perceptions of sustainable development commitments, and such programmes will undoubtedly continue to roll out.

But, in Africa’s current reality, governments must prioritise unlocking capital to invest in the programmes that will build their economies, improve their citizens’ access to critical services and provide their countries with a stronger presence on the global stage. Today, that’s gas, not renewables.