Energy

The debates about appropriate energy sources for South Africa become very heated mainly because of vested interests and hidden agendas. We have seen how the Gupta's have bought Uranium mines in anticipation of a nuclear new build. A well known columnist in the Engineering News worked for the old AEC and for ARMSCOR in the 1980s and now runs an organisation called "Nuclear Africa". He makes some of his money holding annual conferences jointly with Necsa to push the Nuclear option hard. As such he will use every argument under our Sun ( which does indeed send us energy produced by nuclear fusion) to not use solar energy to power our human needs on earth. On the other hand many people in the so called "green" environmental groups neglect the limited life time of solar installations and the limited availability of power from solar or wind installations. Very roughly speaking if a nuclear plant lasts 40 years and a solar plant only 20 years then the capital cost of the solar installation must be less than half that of the nuclear installation to be economically competitive. Furthermore if the nuclear installation only provides power for 80% of the hours in the year, given the need for refuelling an maintenance, and the solar or wind plant only provides power for 20% of the time for obvious reasons, then another factor of 20/80 which is one quarter comes in to play. So the solar installation must be one half times one quarter cheaper to be economically competitive. Hence only when solar and wind installation costs go down to below one eighth that of the nuclear installations can we say that their capital cost is competitive. Now these figures of 20 years, 40 years, 80% and 20% are not fixed and depending on what position you want to take in the debate, you will alter them up or down accordingly to justify your own view. This article by K. Branker a , M.J.M. Pathak a , J.M. Pearce entitled "A review of solar photovoltaic levelized cost of electricity"  provides a useful perspective on how financing options effect the relative cost of energy. In its Table 4 on page 8 it compares the Effect of degradation rate and performance requirement on system life. It shows that at a degradation rate of 0.2% a solar installation could last 80 years while at a 1.0% degradation rate the installation may only last 20 years. The technical challenge then is to reduce the degradation rate. It is these technical nuances which make it imperative that participants in energy debates listen carefully and make scrupulously honest comments in order to make the debate useful. We do not need our energy debates to descend to the level of Nkandla swimming pools being used as fire extinguishers.