Pollution news in brief
March 31, 2008
Posted in Green News
SULPHUR BUSTING FIRST – A new 5,400MW coal-fired power station planned for the Mpumalanga town of Witbank will be fitted with technology to control sulphur dioxide emissions. This will be the first time Eskom installs technology to control sulphur dioxide emission. In the past the utility only regulated dust emissions. Environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk has promised that the power station would be fitted with “the most advanced air pollution abatement equipment installed at a power station in South Africa”. According to a government media release, “the technology to be installed is called flue gas desulphurisation or FGD and involves the scrubbing of sulphur dioxide gas with a sorbent (limestone) to limit the emissions of sulphur dioxide to the atmosphere. The process also removes the majority of the dust from the emissions and has added benefits such as reducing the mercury emissions from the plant.” The reason behind the new power station’s pollution control measures appears to be that it falls within the recently declared Highveld Priority Area. The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism has plans to do something about the poor air quality in the region.
CARBON CREDITS – Chemical group Omnia will reportedly get R60-million from the International Finance Corporation for 1-million of its carbon credits. Omnia will generate about 500,000 certified emission reduction units (CERs) from its Sasolburg plant’s nitrous oxide destruction facility. The IFC has reportedly committed to buying 50 percent of Omnia’s CERs which it will then sell globally. Richard Worthington of the South African Climate Action Network asks in a letter Business Day whether there will be a contribution to sustainable development in the Omnia deal. He says that the emission reduction will be achieved by flaring nitrous oxide, which is required by law in most industrialised countries but is not a costly exercise. (Business Day 1, 2)
BURNING ISSUE – Parliament’s environmental affairs and tourism committee has decided not to ban waste incineration outright but has opted for strict regulation, Business Day reports. Incineration is also used to dispose of hazardous waste and could be used for the co-generation of electricity. Cement producers use incinerated waste in their kilns, the repor says. But environmental NGO groundWork wants incineration banned outright. All “burn” technologies resulted in the release of dioxins and furans (cancer-causing chemicals) and also heavy metals such as mercury, it says. The NGO took the issue to the public protector saying that incineration was a violation of our constitutional right to a healthy environment. According to the new National Environmental Management Waste Bill, applications for licences to incinerate waste would have to provide the department with information about the waste to be disposed of, the existence of incinerators in the area and alternative environmentally friendly treatments. (Business Day)
Arizona to get world’s biggest solar plant
March 10, 2008
Posted in Renewable energy
Even if SA’s power monopoly Eskom does decide to go ahead with its plan to build the 100MW concentrating solar power (CSP) plant near Upington that Treevolution wrote about last year, it will no longer be the world’s biggest. A 280MW CSP plant is being built about 100km southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. At full capacity the plant, known as Solana, will be able to produce enough electricity for 70,000 households, while avoiding over 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases, says the Arizona Public Service Company (APS).
The new facility is being built by Abengoa Solar and is expected to start producing power in 2011. “The facility would be the largest solar power plant in the world if in operation today,” says APS. The utility will buy all the plant’s power for the first 30 years at a cost of about $4 billion. Read more
Solar traffic lights a hit in Cape Town
February 29, 2008
Posted in Renewable energy
South Africa’s first set of solar-powered traffic lights in the Cape Town suburb of Ottery have received positive feedback from everyone from the municipality to motorists, Delivery magazine reports.
The lights have been such a success that people have been asking for them to be installed elsewhere, said the National Energy Efficiency Agency’s Barry Bredenkamp. The Central Energy Fund announced earlier this year that it did indeed have plans to install solar traffic lights in major cities around the country to prevent the traffic chaos caused by Eskom’s “load shedding”. More than 2,000 critical intersections have been identified in Johannesburg alone. One set of solar traffic lights has already been installed in the commercial suburb of Braamfontein. Durban, Port Elizabeth and Nelspruit have also been earmarked for intervention. The National Energy Efficiency Agency will manage the project, the local government magazine reports.
The Ottery lights cost of about R150,000 to install, Bredenkamp said. But if solar traffic lights were to be installed in larger quantities the price of a set of eight lights could come down to R110,000, he said. A conventional set of eight pole traffic lights consumes as much electricity as “a family of four occupying a three-bedroom house”, he said.
Theft of the solar panels and batteries has been a source of concern, but Bredenkamp says that the panels are located high up on street poles and the batteries are in a concrete casing at the bottom of the poles to prevent vandalism, so theft hasn’t been an issue. The lights also have a control mechanism that alerts the service provider if they are being tampered with.
10-point plan to solve the electricity crisis
February 6, 2008
Posted in Green News
A group of NGO’s has put together a 10-point plan aimed at turning the current electricity crisis into an opportunity for South Africa to shift to a more long-term sustainable approach that reduces our reliance on coal and nuclear power.
“We have an opportunity to do things differently. A focus on energy efficiency in the short term, with a longer-term emphasis on renewable energy for generation will take us down the renewable road, meeting the sustainable development aims and address climate change along the way,” Earthlife Africa’s Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Project, which is spearheading the campaign, said in a press statement.
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