United Nations joins South Africa in finding answers to the energy crisis

After driving for almost two hours from South Africa’s capital, Pretoria – but still a few kilometres away from our destination – tall chimneys, several boilers and surrounding buildings appear from the horizon, dominating the roughly flat landscape. A few minutes later, we arrive at Komati Power Station, a coal-fired station run by a state-owned company, Eskom, the country’s major supplier of electricity.

The purpose of our visit to Komati in Mpumalanga Province – as a United Nations team led by the head of the UN in South Africa and its Resident Coordinator, Nelson Muffuh – was to learn from Eskom authorities their plans for a just transition for the employees and local communities affected by the mothballed plant, and how it is going to be reused as a source for renewable energy. 

Komati was decommissioned or retired in October 2022 after having operated for 61 years. At its peak, the plant used to contribute 1,000 megawatts of electricity to the national grid. As the seventh biggest coal producer in the world, South Africa gets 80% of its electricity needs from coal-fired plants to power Africa’s second biggest economy.

The country is currently going through a crippling nationwide energy crisis, forcing Eskom to implement rotational power cuts or loadshedding for up to 10 hours day.

The environmental and social impacts on South Africa’s reliance on coal to generate electricity is astounding. According to Greenpeace, an advocacy group, the air pollution in Mpumalanga Province – which supplies the bulk of the country’s coal needs – is the most polluted in the world, with record levels of nitrogen dioxide. The province hosts more than 83% of SA’s coal production and most of the coal-powered plants.

The lingering headache among South Africans is the morning after – the plight of employees who will lose their jobs, and the fate of the affected communities, when more plants are closed, as is being planned. This is despite pledges by authorities that they will carefully manage the switch to renewable energy and ensure that closing coal plants will be spread over a reasonable timeframe. Undoubtedly, these assurances also recognize that South Africa has an abundance of coal which continue to play a key role in generating the bulk of its electricity needs.

In a statement Eskom issued on the day the Komati plant was officially shut down, the public utility company said it “has developed a comprehensive Just Energy Transition (JET) Strategy which places equal importance on the ‘transition to lower carbon technologies,’ and the ability to do so in a manner that is ‘just’ and sustainable. The remaining employees will take part in the Komati Repowering and Repurposing project.”

The statement goes on to say: “The power plant will be converted into a renewable generation site powered with 150MW of solar, 70MW of wind and 150MW of storage batteries, thereby continuing to put the site and its associated transmission infrastructure into good use and to provide economic opportunities to the community.”

During a briefing to the UN team by Komati’s managers, economic activities at the plant have already started – albeit still on a small scale. There is the desalination plant which produces high quality, blue-drop certified water, which is then sold to local communities.

Another is the aquaponics project, which grows fish in tanks and uses their waste as nutrients to feed plants without soil. Currently the fish of choice is the tilapia, which is popular among South Africans.

The managers informed the UN team that before Eskom closed the plant, it carried out an exhaustive study of its economic and social impacts, which involved consulting workers, labour unions and the affected communities, among others.

Eskom says the plan to reuse Komati as a source for renewable energy is “one of the largest coal-fired power plant decommissioning, repowering and repurposing projects globally and will serve as a global reference on how to transition fossil-fuel assets.”

For its part, the UN in South Africa has also initiated several projects in local communities in the provinces of Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Limpopo as part of its contribution to the country’s transition to clean and renewable resources.

In the province of Mpumalanga, the UN family has a range of concluded, ongoing and planned projects, from climate finance of climate-resilient schools and health care facilities, to the looking at the impact of energy and environment on children, working on youth entrepreneurship in the sector, green learning (UNICEF); conducting a situational analysis to examine opportunities and challenges for a JET and  capacity building for municipal managers on JT (ILO); as well as working with ESKOMs energy transition programme (which includes financing the ESKOM repurposing and repowering initiative) and community development (WB). The plans are to increase the UN initiatives in Mpumalanga, because this is the province where most of the socio-economic impacts of the energy transition will be felt.

In Eastern Cape, one example of the UN initiatives is a project by the UNDP, which set up a wind-solar hybrid mini-grid in the Upper Blinkwater community and installed groundwater-pumping wind turbines in two remote schools. The project now provides the local community with access to clean and affordable energy, benefiting almost 60 households and improving access to clean water to about 550 students and 16 teachers.

At the COP26 conference in Glasgow in 2021, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the European Union announced they would make available US$8.5 billion to speed up South Africa’s transition from reliance on coal-fired plants to clean energy under a Just Energy Transition Partnership. Progress has already been made on how and when these funds will be released and used to solve South Africa’s energy crisis, and, as part of this initiative, the South African Government has launched an investment plan at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022.

Several more coal-fired plants are expected to meet the same fate as Komati. What is clear is that it’s no longer a question of whether more plants will be closed or not, but when they will eventually be put to rest. Hence the need to start the transition now.