Guest Feature: South Africa’s Grid—What Went Wrong?

Update 7/26/23 with more context on South Africa’s nuclear history.

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary South Africa is load shedding—a systemic response to a lack of electricity. The problems stems from mismanagement of the electricity grid, from blocking new generation capacity to poor maintenance, and abuse of baseload plants due to renewable energy policies. In other words, a number of factors blocked nuclear and coal construction that once held Eskom, the state electricity service, as one of the most efficient and best run utilities in the world. Now, areas of the country run without power during scheduled blackouts, disproportionately affecting the poor.

South Africa remains the only country in Africa with nuclear power. Adding new plants may help solve the electricity crisis while reaching climate goals.

According to Radiant Energy Group founder and nuclear power consultant and advocate Mark Nelson, nuclear remains one of the most reliable and valuable parts of the South African electricity grid.

“Many things are going wrong in South Africa. Things that used to work are falling apart. One thing that's extremely complicated, extremely technical, and extremely valuable, but is still working is South Africa's nuclear fleet,” Nelson said. “They have a pair of reactors, french design, built several decades ago, and those reactors perform extremely well even as the basic infrastructure technology starts unraveling in the rest of the country.”

A History of Nuclear Power in South Africa

David Nicholls, the Chairman of South Africa Nuclear Energy Corporation and former Chief Nuclear Officer (CNO) at Eskom, said construction plans for new power stations in the 1990s were canceled, which led to a reduction in their engineering project management and construction expertise. The decision crippled their ability to build quickly and efficiently.

According to Ted Blom, Mining and Energy Advisor and Former Manager of Construction at Eskom, the utility won a utility of the year award over 20 years ago. In the 2000’s, however, Eskom made poor decisions that led to the current crisis, Nicholls and Blom said.

“And so Eskom went into a crisis from 2007 onwards, from which it has never recovered from and that crisis was keeping the lights on,” Nicholls said. “As a manager, you were told to basically do whatever is required, just keep the lights on, keep the power going. There was no long term plan, as long term planning stopped in 2008. In my opinion, it then became survival planning.”

The government scrapped plans for new coal and nuclear plants, according to Blom and Nichols. Additionally, Eskom used contaminated, lower-grade coal that damaged boilers in the fleet, causing unreliability and poor performance, Blom said. The intermittent nature of renewables also puts strain on the plants, having to rapidly ramp up and down due to fluctuations in sun and wind.

“There is tremendous damage. In fact, there’s not a boiler of the 14 core stations in Maputo, Malanga area, which hasn't been stressed by either the contaminated coal or because of renewable energy coming and going on a daily basis,” Blom said. “The stressing and distressing on a daily basis or twice daily basis has caused a lot of fatigue in the boiler metal. So a lot of the boilers are just waiting to explode.”

According to Hugo Kruger, a civil nuclear engineer that writes about South Africa in a substack, South Africa’s energy problems began with privatization in the early 1990s. Kruger said he believes the privatized utility sparked geopolitical conflicts.

Additionally, massive amounts of Black people moved to cities following the fall of Apartheid, but very little extra electricity came on to the grid, and private companies had no incentive to build plants because the economy had flatlined. Kruger, a member of Truth in Energy, which criticizes government energy policy, said environmental NGOs often block needed new capacity as well.

In 2008, load shedding started. According to Kruger, the government’s board, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa, forced Eskom to sell at a loss while imposing that they give people free electricity. Economically, this worsened and accelerated a downhill trend that led to the level of blackouts today.

According to Nelson, while the anti-nuclear presence in South Africa is smaller than in other countries, it has an outsize impact because of weaker institutions. Kelvin Kemm, the CEO of SMR Global Energy, with experience in nuclear technology planning in South Africa, said anti-nuclear opposition has been very effective at blocking nuclear power within the country.

South Africa was the first country in the world to start developing a commercial small modular reactor, beginning in the mid-1990s according to Kemm. Kemm said a country should have a healthy 15% reserve margin on electricity to ensure energy security. Over the years of mismanagement, this reserve has dwindled at Eskom. South Africa eventually reached the point of having no reserve, using 100 percent of available electricity.

An opportunity to add capacity and ease the system came in 2008, when the government discussed building nuclear on the basis of its carbon benefits. The government decided against such action, however, because it said tariffs were not high enough to build the plants, according to Nicholls.

In addition to opposition from anti-nuclear environmentalists, nuclear faces competition from other energy sources, like renewables and fossil fuels, because nuclear power could make them all obsolete.

“There was a general anti[nuclear position] because it would squeeze out everything else,” Nicholls said. “I mean, the logical thing if you believe you want dispatchable low-cost, low-carbon energy, you end up with large scale hydro plants or nuclear—there is nothing else.”

In terms of the current energy crisis, the problem does not lie entirely in a lack of power generating plants, according to Nicholls. He said that instead, the main issues come from unreliability and poor performance.

Nelson places most of the blame for South Africa’s energy woes from their failure to expand their nuclear fleet when it had the opportunity and a general lack of understanding of electricity grids.

“I think the western world is not paying enough attention,” Nelson said. “I think that the collapse of nuclear ambitions followed almost immediately by load shedding, permanent load shedding is a very strong lesson of how badly things can go wrong when energy illiteracy and incompetency takes hold and societies that are not strong enough to self-correct.”

The current government is relatively pro-nuclear according to multiple sources. Kemm said several years ago the Minister of Energy declared a 2,500 megawatt nuclear project currently underway.

Like what you’re reading? Click the button to get Grid Brief right in your inbox.

Anti-nuclear Opposition

Many anti-nuclear environmentalists tackle issues of energy development through a Malthusian lens that discourages development in poorer parts of the world like Africa, because of the degradation it will cause to the planet.

“They don't want much more electricity available in the world because it degrades the planet,” Kemm said. “She [an anti-nuclear green] said to my face, that they want to put the brakes on development in Africa. I had a Swiss person saying to me, showing me a picture of a black woman carrying a bucket of water on her head from the river. And they say well, we got to keep them doing it. We cannot let them get pumps.”

The same person showed Kemm a picture of a black man plowing his land with an ox. The anti-nuclear advocate said that Africans like the one in the picture must continue to do so, instead of upgrading to tractors for environmental benefits and living a “life close to nature.”

Peter Becker, an anti-nuclear activist that re-formed the Koeberg Alert Alliance, a group that tried to prevent Koeberg nuclear plant from going into operation in the 1980’s, said he opposes nuclear because of his concerns about nuclear waste.

“We use the electricity now, but the waste stays around for hundreds and 1000s of years,” Becker said. “So how do we justify getting our little kick out of that electricity now and saying to hundreds of future generations, ‘Sorry about this’?”

Nuclear waste can be stored safely on site of nuclear plants in containers strong enough to withstand RPG missiles. It can also be recycled to be used to create more electricity.

Becker admits he’s not an expert, but said he thinks the world will transition to renewables. Aware of the comforts of modern society, however, he said he would support natural gas at limited capacity to provide heat on cold days when the sun isn’t shining. Becker said there needs to be a mix as the grid transitions.

By contrast, Kemm said he thinks the world will eventually transition to nuclear, as an efficient, no-carbon energy source.

The Future of Nuclear and Current Governance

Kemm, who is developing his own reactor, the HTMR 1000, said he is optimistic about the future of small modular reactors globally. According to Kemm, small reactors confer an advantage of requiring much lower initial capital costs.

Corruption plays a large part in the dysfunctionality of the South African grid, Blom said. Blom has actively complained to regulators about the issue.

“Because the stations have now been badly run, what's also happened is, you now got massive corruption in the organization that was constantly pushing up the cost metrics,” Blom said. “And over the last year or two, we've now got active saboteurs where employees are taking bribes from suppliers to deliberately sabotage equipment so that the suppliers can come in and make extra money.”

Leaders at Eskom and in the government do not fundamentally understand the nuances of the electricity grid, according to Nelson.

“If leaders, both of the electricity company and of the country do not have an understanding of where electricity comes from, or how it works, or even just how to keep maintaining exactly what you have, what we're learning from South Africa is that it can fall apart. It is not automatically self sustaining,” Nelson said.

Private industry failed to fix the grid as some hoped, Blom said. Specifically, the offered return on investments were too low for private companies to take on construction responsibilities.

For Blom, to end load shedding and return to a healthy electric grid, the government would need to embark on an at least five year program costing 600 billion rand to refurbish existing coal and nuclear plants and add new ones. In terms of fuel availability, Blom said the country has enough coal reserves to power the country for 400 years.

Blom also advocated for smaller reactors due to cost overruns on larger projects. He said the effects of the energy crisis have been detrimental to the economy.

“I think the problem we've got here is our treasury is bankrupt,” Blom said. “And Eskom is totally bankrupt.”

Some blame politics for the current situation. Ndabezinhle Sibiya, a speechwriter for five premiers, said he believes serious problems with the electricity grid began after Jacob Zuma was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa as president of South Africa. Zuma planned to install multiple power stations, including eight nuclear reactors providing 9,600 megawatts of electricity within 15 years from 2016.

Ramaphosa’s government has shifted towards pro-renewable policies and away from nuclear in ways that worsen the load shedding crisis, Sibiya added.

Considering more affluent South Africans can afford solar with batteries and generators, Sibiya said people in deep rural areas and those living in “conditions of squalor” in townships are the most affected by the current energy crisis.

“In places where the grid fails, you get a tiny number of people who stay really rich, but overwhelming misery for the (majority of the) population,” Nelson said.

Sibiya believes that while the government has some financial problems, the narrative generated that South Africa could not afford to build new nuclear plants was false. He said this perspective was supported by renewable energy lobbyists and Western interests and that mainstream media’s careless reporting planted the idea in people’s minds.

Frustrations of the “Rainbow Nation”

Many South Africans, especially young people, are frustrated with the slow rate of progress, and perhaps even regression in terms of social equity in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.” As poor people bear the brunt of load shedding’s negative consequences, many become disillusioned and angry at how the state is failing to provide for them.

In fact, a number of organizations have leveraged legal action against the government, claiming that load shedding has become a pressing human rights concern and that the government’s behavior and negligence violate constitutional and fundamental rights of citizens. Among the applicants are The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, Build One South Africa, the IFP, and Democracy in Action. They argue the government has no strategy to defend the poor against load shedding.

“I think South Africa is one of the most important energy stories in the world, because what you had was an unjust, unequal functioning society, collapsing into a still unjust, still unequal and dysfunctional society,” Nelson said. “It's a terrifying story with implications I can only imagine now. I don't think I can even put words to what I feel when I watch a country have its infrastructure stripped apart and destroyed in front of our eyes.”

Jack Austin is a writer, researcher, and journalist originally from Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years, he has written about political rallies, indigenous issues, music, art, sustainability, and energy. Currently Jack works as a writer and researcher for Stand Up for Nuclear, a pro-nuclear advocacy organization. Jack graduated from Northwestern with academic honors. In his free time, Jack makes music and is a radio DJ, plays soccer, and runs marathons to fundraise for leukemia research.