Coal provides 80% of South Africa’s power. — AFP
Middelburg, South Africa: The cold corridors of South Africa’s once-mighty Komati coal-fired power plant have been quiet since its shutdown in 2022 in what was trumpeted as a pioneering project in the world’s transition to green energy.
Two years later, plans to repurpose the country’s oldest coal power plant have amounted to little in a process that offers caution and lessons for countries intending to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and switch to renewables.
Jobs have been lost and construction for wind and solar energy generation has yet to start, with only a few small green projects underway.
“We cannot construct anything. We cannot remove anything from the site,” acting general manager Theven Pillay told AFP at the 63-year-old plant embedded in the coal belt in Mpumalanga province, where the air hangs thick with smog.
Poor planning and delays in paperwork to authorise the full decommissioning of the plant have been the main culprits for the standstill, he said. “We should have done things earlier. So we would consider it is not a success.”
Before it turned off the switches in October 2022, the plant fed 121 megawatts into South Africa’s chronically undersupplied and erratic electricity grid.
The transition plan – which won US$497mil in funding from the World Bank – envisions the generation of 150 megawatts via solar and 70 megawatts from wind, with capacity for 150 megawatts of battery storage.
Workers are to be reskilled and the plant’s infrastructure, including its massive cooling towers, repurposed.
But much of this is still a long way off. “They effectively just shut down the coal plant and left the people to deal with the outcomes,” said deputy energy and electricity minister Samantha Graham.
Coal provides 80% of South Africa’s power and the country is among the world’s top 12 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Coal is also a bedrock of its economy, employing around 90,000 people.
South Africa was the first country in the world to form a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with international funders to move off dirty power generation, already receiving US$13.6bil in total in grants and loans, Neil Cole of the JETP presidential committee said.
Komati is the first coal plant scheduled for decommissioning, with five of the remaining 14 ones meant to follow by 2030. It had directly employed 393 people, the state energy firm Eskom that owns the plant said. Only 162 remain on site as others volunteered for transfer or accepted payouts.
The plant had been the main provider of employment in the small town, where the quiet streets are pitted with chunks of coal. Today, several houses are vacant as workers from other provinces headed home after losing their jobs. — AFP
