SA could become the renewable energy powerhouse of Africa 

My husband tells the tale of his great-grandfather, who lost an extraordinary opportunity because he couldn’t see what was coming down the road. He was a wagon maker in Johannesburg. The story goes that one day he was approached by Ford and offered the Ford Agency in South Africa. He refused. Why? Because he didn’t see a future in the motor car.

This inability to catch the zeitgeist and seize the opportunity seems to be plaguing South Africa. Some of our politicians are enthusiastic about 20th-century fuels such as coal, oil and gas, but show no excitement about the power and potential of fast-developing solar, wind and storage technologies.

Why are some in our government rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of digging up oil and gas wherever they can find it, while having a yawn-yawn reaction to the miracle that is renewable energy?

Tuesday, 22 April, is Earth Day 2025. This year’s theme, “Our power, our planet”, encourages everyone around the globe to unite behind renewable energy, with a call to triple global electricity generation from renewable energy by 2030. There are many forms of renewable energy, but South Africa’s strengths are in solar and wind power, both of which have extraordinary positives.

First up, solar and wind energy are cheap and getting cheaper all the time. The CSIR showed back in 2014 that in South Africa, the cost of new solar PV and wind is 40% cheaper than new baseload coal.

The Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) has also stated, based on extensive modelling, that renewable energy, supported by storage solutions, is the cheapest form of electricity generation in South Africa.

Renewable energy is getting cheaper because experience and innovation is happening all the time all over the world and “the more one does it, the cheaper it gets” to quote Tobias Bischof-Niemz, of the CSIR .

It is cheaper because of something so obvious but so game-changing that we struggle to get our minds round it. The fact is that once you have forked out the money to get your solar or wind plant up and running, you don’t have to buy any fuel to feed it.

Think about it. If you build a power plant that produces electricity from coal, which is our major fuel for producing electricity in South Africa, every single day someone has to feed coal to the plant. This means that someone somewhere has to dig up the coal, which is a hard, dangerous, lung-damaging job, and the mining process leaves ugly coal ash dumps and water-polluting acid mine drainage.

The coal then has to be cleaned, stored and transported to the power plant, often in heavy, road-damaging trucks. Then it is crushed before it is burned to fuel huge turbines.

But no one has to dig up, clean, refine, crush or transport the wind or the sun to keep a wind or solar farm running – it just arrives by itself. It costs nothing. You can’t be side-swiped by a sudden increase in the price of your feedstock fuel, you can’t run out of stock, no one can steal it and no one can manipulate the price of it either.

Another extraordinary fact that we have not really taken on board is that renewable energy is a flow, not a stock, so it does not deplete.

If you dig a well to source oil or gas, the stock of oil or gas will be limited and gets harder to access over time. Sun and wind are not a depleting stock. A small town that grows up around a solar farm does not have to fear the day in the future when its energy source will be depleted.

No combustion is taking place at a solar or wind farm either, so no one is breathing in pollutants that cause respiratory diseases, shorten lives and create health costs.

And small renewable energy projects are great for providing energy solutions to rural areas where no one wants to pay to extend traditional grid infrastructure as the number of users is too small to cover the cost.

But the downside is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. This is the intermittency problem which people have worried about for so long.

The good news is that huge strides are being taken to overcome this challenge. For instance, batteries store excess energy during peak production and release it during low generation periods, and batteries are getting cheaper and better.

Alongside the well-known lithium-ion batteries, mechanical forms of storage are being developed – gravity storage, for example. When there is excess renewable energy, it is used to drive a winch which lifts a weight. When the energy supply is too low to meet demand, the weight is released, releasing its stored energy. Research is happening in repurposing mine shafts for gravity batteries because the shafts can have drops of more than a kilometre.

Another answer to the intermittency problem is to site a solar farm and a wind farm close together so that the production of each can complement the other and they can share the same grid connection infrastructure. This is called co-location.

Also, countries, or distant areas within a country, are starting to connect cables to each other so that they can send energy back and forth to each other to balance supply and demand in their respective locations. There really is lots of exciting innovation and problem-solving going on.

So how feasible is it to meet a country’s energy needs from renewable energy? Uruguay recently ran on 100% renewable power for 10 straight months. Power production costs have declined, new jobs have been created and Uruguay has become a net exporter of electricity.

At least 10 countries are on track to get more than two-thirds of their electricity from wind and solar by 2030, and 19 could have more than half their electricity produced from the two technologies by 2030. Chile is aiming for 80–90% renewable electricity by 2030 and will have phased out coal by 2030.

South Africa could easily follow suit because it has tremendous untapped solar and wind potential spread over many provinces. It could become a renewable energy powerhouse of Africa.  

Why is it essential that we seize this renewable energy potential, phase out coal and don’t go down the oil and gas route? Some politicians would argue for a diversity of energy sources.

It is hard to see why we would choose more expensive options but the really urgent and pressing argument is this: we have to generate huge amounts of energy to power our modern world but it has become essential that we do so with a lighter footprint on the Earth.

The human and non-human world lives or dies by our ability to function within the physical, chemical and biological systems of planet Earth. Scientists (and Earth itself) are shouting loudly at us that we are overshooting Earth’s planetary boundaries and all our metrics show that Earth and its creatures are steadily declining in health and resilience.

Using coal, oil and gas for energy is far more polluting and environmentally destructive than using renewable energy. A rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is vital to arresting this decline in planetary health.

My husband’s ancestor thought that the future was business as usual. Stuck in old ways, he failed to seize the opportunity. Let’s not make the same mistake. DM