Two and a half years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, South Africa signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with wealthy nations to collaborate on rolling out clean energy to replace coal in a socially fair manner.
President Cyril Ramaphosa described the $8.5 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership” (JETP) as a “watershed moment” – and then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it a “game-changing partnership”.
But, as South Africa prepares to head to the polls next Wednesday in an election that could force Ramaphosa’s ruling party to share power for the first time since apartheid ended, there is still little to show for the energy transition deal on the ground.
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Crispian Olver, executive director of the Presidential Climate Commission which is advising the government on the JETP, told Climate Home: “This is a bit like trying to turn a big container-ship – it’s slow to shift onto a new path, but once it’s on that new course, things will start to move faster.”
As of last November, just $308 million of grant-funded projects under the JETP had reached the implementation phase, government data shows. Of this, just $30m was categorised as spending on the just transition in the coal-dependent Mpumalanga province.
The government has not published equivalent information on loans – which make up 97% of the donor-backed support. But those following the JETP say progress has been slow partly because South Africa’s state-owned electricity generator Eskom is reluctant to take on more debt.
In addition, South Africa’s energy ministry and the wealthy governments that are providing funding disagree on the role of gas in the country’s energy transition. The donors backing the JETP are the US, Canada, Britain, Switzerland, the European Union, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Denmark and Spain.
Coal plant closures have been delayed by South Africa’s lack of reliable electricity, which has led to rolling power black-outs known as “load-shedding”.
While problems affecting the coal sector are a key cause of unreliable electricity supplies, Eskom has said it will delay the closure of three coal-fired power plants in response to the crisis.
South Africa’s best wind and solar resources, in the south and west, meanwhile remain under-utilised because the national power grid is already congested in those areas.
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To transport the clean power, Eskom is trying to build transmission cables but progress has been slow as the utility is deeply in debt and reluctant to take on new loans through the JETP – even if those loans are offered on cheap terms.
An Eskom spokesperson said that “off-balance sheet options” – like allowing the private sector to build cables and substations – are being considered, but the details are still to be finalised.
Electricity cables at South Africa’s Lethaba power station in 2007 (Photos: World Bank)
Yet not all government departments want a rapid transition to renewables. The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), led by pro-coal minister Gwede Mantashe, recently published an energy planning document that envisages a sharp slowdown in the roll-out of solar and wind power and instead more of a shift from coal to gas power plants.
This has complicated things for the international partner group behind the JETP. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations told Climate Home that South Africa’s apparent reticence to switch to renewables is slowing the pace of funding flows under the deal.
On the other hand, South Africa’s parliament recently approved a Climate Change Bill and a Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill, which seeks to create a competitive power market and end Eskom’s century-long, coal-dominated monopoly. The legislation will render the DMRE’s controversial gas-reliant energy plans less relevant, as it paves the way for more electricity to be produced by private companies.
Energy minister Gwede Mantashe (left) speaks to President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) in 2018 (Photos: South African government)
But that has done little to appease anxious workers and residents in the heart of the country’s coal belt. In particular, the town of Komati offers a warning of the electoral damage that can occur if coal-plant repurposing projects don’t go smoothly.
Eskom’s coal-fired power station in Komati was retired from service in October 2022 after reaching its end-of-life date. It is now being converted into a solar, wind and food farm, a solar microgrid assembly factory and training facility.
Parts of it are now starting to open but for many local people, it is too little too late. “The community is currently facing a pandemic of unemployment and poverty,” said community leader Carlos Vilankulu, who is also a repurposing project liaison officer.
Eskom says none of its workers lost their jobs when the last coal units were taken offline – many were transferred to other power stations. But local guesthouses and other small businesses in the community say they are struggling as a result of the closure.
A man selling second-hand tyres waits for customers in Komati village, May 9, 2024 (Photo: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko)
“Everything has come to a standstill. Many people are unemployed,” said Alta de Bruin, a guest-house owner based in Komati village. While the repurposing project has generally been well received, it “could have started a long time ago”, de Bruin told Climate Home.
The decision to close down Komati was made long before South Africa agreed to its climate finance package at COP26, but the local transformation project is intended to serve as a blueprint for other just transition initiatives in the country.
It has been a cautionary tale, according to Olver. Community consultations on the way forward only took place years after the decision was made to shut Komati – meaning local residents and businesses were left in a state of limbo. “The next [coal power] stations will do it better,“ he said.
Besides South Africa, JETPs have also been signed with Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal. Leo Roberts, an analyst with climate change think-tank E3G, said South Africa’s delays in closing down its coal plants are concerning.
Indonesia has also postponed coal plant closures after expressing disappointment with rich countries’ support, while Vietnam’s partnership has ground to a halt amid political turmoil.
“We mustn’t lose sight of what the JETPs need to deliver,” Roberts said. “This is ultimately about reducing emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, dealing with the huge health pollution challenges coal causes, and supporting countries to deliver self-defined low-carbon development pathways.”
(Reporting by Nick Hedley; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
The post As South Africa heads to the polls, voters await stalled “just energy transition” appeared first on Climate Home News.
As South Africa heads to the polls, voters await stalled “just energy transition”
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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