Government could solve South Africa’s energy crisis if, for example, it turned a space like its Northern Cape nuclear waste dump site into a giant solar farm.
Energy expert Wido Schnabel, business development director for Canadian Solar South Africa, believes the country needs to take bolder steps towards renewable energy solutions, particularly in light of its power supply crisis.
South Africa, he told TimesLIVE Premium, risked missing out on a potential investment bonanza due to its lethargic approach to renewables. “They are dragging their feet,” Schnabel said of the government’s energy policy stakeholders.
Speaking last week at a three-day Solar Power Africa trade fair in Cape Town, Schnabel used the example of the state-owned Vaalputs facility in the Northern Cape, used to store radioactive waste from Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. Vaalputs has a wide exclusion zone, big enough to host a huge solar farm in one of the sunniest places on earth — the Namaqualand. “Imagine that exclusion zone plastered with solar panels — that would provide more energy that we produce in South Africa,” Schnabel told delegates.
South Africa’s energy policy favours a mix of nuclear, renewable and coal-fired power stations, with a long-term goal of increasing the renewable proportion to reduce the country’s carbon footprint.
Delegates at the trade show generally agreed that South Africa needed to accelerate efforts to attract investment into the renewable energy space, including green hydrogen projects.
Namibia’s huge green hydrogen project, with an investment value almost equal to the country’s GDP, was held up as an example of the kind of bold initiative lacking in South Africa.
Michael Dehn, South African MD of event organisers Messe Frankfurt, which hosted Solar Power Africa, said it was an “extremely successful” event with multiple high-powered attendees, including a delegation from the German ministry of economy and climate action.
Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis added his voice to the green energy gathering, an annual event at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. In an introductory statement included in the event programme he said: “Cape Town hosts Solar Power Africa at an important time for furthering clean energy development in Africa. We have advanced plans to be a leading city for renewable energy deployment on the continent. Over time, Cape Town will add a full 1GW of new energy to our grid via power purchases, our own projects, and incentivising small-scale generation. The 2024 Solar Power Africa event is an opportunity to bring the rapidly growing industry together to share knowledge, expertise and ideas as we make the great transition to energy that is reliable, cost-effective and carbon-neutral.”
Two years ago the SA government proposed expanding its Vaalputs waste facility to accommodate different classes of nuclear waste, including high-level waste.
The centralised interim storage facility has been on the cards for years and stems from the country’s radioactive waste management and strategy policy, which makes provision for a “long-term aboveground storage on an off-site facility licensed for this purpose”.
High-level waste from the country’s sole nuclear power station, Koeberg, is stored on site at the power station, at the rate of about 30 tonnes a year.
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