On March 12, the night before Energy Minister Jeff Radebe was to sign 27 renewable energy contracts, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa obtained a late-night interdict at the High Court in Pretoria, stopping the ceremony.
It sent shock waves through government circles and the energy sector. Independent power producers had waited years to sign these power purchase agreements.
Numsa spokeswoman Phakamile Hlubi was emphatic that this was a victory for workers.
"The IPP roll-out will raise the cost of electricity dramatically because IPPs cost much more than coal-fired electricity. The ANC government clearly wants to make the working class and the poor suffer even more than they do now," she declared.
Numsa estimates that 40,000 workers employed at coal-fired power stations will lose their jobs if the government implements the renewable energy programme in its current format.
Two weeks after the union obtained its interdict, the court struck the case off the roll, paving the way for Radebe and the IPPs to sign the power purchase agreements. The union and government will still argue this matter in full before the courts.
It is not clear what methodology Numsa and the National Union of Mineworkers - which also opposes the renewables programme - have used to determine the IPPs' impact on their members. South Africa's energy needs are stipulated in the integrated resource policy document, which provides for renewables, nuclear and "other generation sources".With the cost of a nuclear build programme prohibitively high, it is only logical for South Africa to put more emphasis on renewables as the most attractive route towards clean energy and energy security. Renewable energy in all its forms - solar, wind, hydro, biomass, gas - is changing the way the world consumes energy and bringing new forms of power to communities bypassed by traditional energy transmission regimes.
Although the government is undertaking an ambitious power station build programme - which is revitalising towns such as Lephalale in Limpopo - overreliance on the fossil fuel that is coal to generate electricity cannot be sustained. Coal is a pollutant that is harmful to the environment and sets the country back in terms of meeting greenhouse gas emission targets required to fulfil South Africa's climate change commitments.
Building and operating coal-fired power stations is labour-intensive - which is good for employment.
But there are negatives to coal. Transporting it to power stations is taking a massive toll on the country's roads which will require billions to repair. Transmitting that electricity from power stations to homes and businesses is expensive and many municipalities are buckling under the weight of generation and transmission costs set by Eskom.
At the South African Local Government Association Energy Summit in March, municipalities demanded to be released from the Eskom stranglehold and to be allowed to generate their own electricity, as well as purchase directly from IPPs.
Salga chairman Parks Tau said municipalities had been negotiating for years for this right.
At the same summit, Xola Pakati, mayor of Buffalo City in the Eastern Cape, said it did not make economic sense for municipalities to purchase power generated in Mpumalanga and Limpopo and transmitted thousands of kilometres via the grid. "Our electricity is generated in Mpumalanga and transmitted to the Eastern Cape. We pay more for that - our geographical location is a disadvantage for us," he told delegates.
But it is not just municipalities that are desperate for a transition to new forms of energy. As Mike Levington, chairman of the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association's green economy subcommittee, pointed out, South Africa is falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to deploying renewable energy. This year, 100 gigawatts of solar energy will power global business and homes as more countries migrate from centralised energy generation and transmission.When those opposed to renewable energy initially argued against it, they pointed to the high costs of purchasing from IPPs.
At that time, prices of over R2 per kilowatt were the norm, but now the cost of producing renewable energy is almost on a par with traditional electricity generation and transmission - what is known as grid parity.
"The prices of solar and wind energy have dropped to as low as 80c per kilowatt. You are in a process where you can compete with Eskom on power price," Levington said.
These figures are corroborated by Eskom, which expects to integrate its first wind and solar project, BW4, into the grid by September next year at a cost of 82c per kilowatt for wind turbines and R1 per kilowatt for solar power, in current rand terms.
It anticipates that the electricity sector's total contribution to greenhouse gas emissions will be limited to 275million tons as a result of the government's renewable energy programme.
As the cost of solar and other renewable energy sources decreases, innovators will come up with cheap energy solutions for communities in Africa that aren't integrated into traditional grids, providing them with access to some form of alternative energy source.
Instead of opposing renewable energy, trade unions should be partnering with the government and the energy industry to devise ways in which their members can be retrained to make a living out of new energy forms. Granted, there will be job losses, but these can be minimised if decisive action is taken to reskill many of the affected workers. Sulking in the corner and threatening mass action will not reverse the global march towards clean, renewable and increasingly cheaper energy...