Koeberg Nuclear Power Station on the West Coast near Cape Town We are driven by desperation to consider alternatives for sustainable energy sources rather than being proactive and acting strategically to optimise outcomes, writes Nkosinathi Solomon.
The strategic energy policy question is not whether nuclear energy is better than renewable energy or vice versa. The question is: what is the optimal energy mix for South Africa that will best address our economic development challenges? Any optimisation problem relies on the formulation of the objective function and the constraints imposed on it. While some are fuzzy on the objective function, they seem clear that we can either have nuclear, wind or solar, and nothing else.
My argument is that there are other alternatives to be considered in the energy mix. Firstly, the strategic envelope for the analysis of our energy policy should be the Southern African Development Community (SADC), not the Republic of South Africa, given that there are significant energy sources outside South Africa, with South Africa being a massive energy sink. The DRC has hydro energy resources, Botswana has coal resources, Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Namibia have significant natural gas resources. It is also unclear why our own coal resources are not in the future energy mix, given our relative size to massive coal burners such as China and India.
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The strategic energy policy question is not whether nuclear energy is better than renewable energy or vice versa. The question is: what is the optimal energy mix for South Africa that will best address our economic development challenges? Any optimisation problem relies on the formulation of the objective function and the constraints imposed on it. While some are fuzzy on the objective function, they seem clear that we can either have nuclear, wind or solar, and nothing else.
My argument is that there are other alternatives to be considered in the energy mix. Firstly, the strategic envelope for the analysis of our energy policy should be the Southern African Development Community (SADC), not the Republic of South Africa, given that there are significant energy sources outside South Africa, with South Africa being a massive energy sink. The DRC has hydro energy resources, Botswana has coal resources, Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, Namibia have significant natural gas resources. It is also unclear why our own coal resources are not in the future energy mix, given our relative size to massive coal burners such as China and India.
Read more.....
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