COP27 kicks off in Egypt

FIFI PETERS: The next two weeks are going to be dominated by a whole lot of conversations around climate change and the Just Energy Transition coming out of COP27 [the 27th UN Climate Change conference] currently under way in Egypt. We know that most countries are taking steps to move away from fossil fuels – like coal as the primary energy source – and into renewable energy, mainly wind and solar.

To discuss the role of gas in the Just Energy Transition and expectations from COP 2017 currently under way, I’m joined by Wayne Glossop. He’s the power systems engineer and senior business development manager at Wärtsilä. Wayne, thanks so much for your time.

Let’s start with COP, given that it’s buzzing across all headlines or notifications coming on your phone or wherever you get your notifications from, the airwaves as well as television. What are you looking out for at that conference?

WAYNE GLOSSOP: Good evening, Fifi. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. COP is really a great opportunity for many of the developed nations to come, to step up and do good on the financial commitments that they’ve been claiming for many years until now, and actually help out Africa and South Africa to transition to a 100% renewable energy provider, and help Africa to demonstrate and be a pioneer on this new energy revolution, if we can call it that.

As we know, Africa is really well endowed with many renewable energy sources – wind and solar. So we are well placed as a continent to leapfrog the traditional energy journey that many developed nations have taken in the past and show that even though we are just a 3% emissions contributor as a continent in the world, we can really pioneer how this future energy transition can look like for the world.

FIFI PETERS: You make the argument that in order to do that successfully we need to look at gas being part of the equation. It’s a contentious issue for some, given the fact that gas, while less harmful than the likes of coal, is not as great for the environment, in the arguments of some, as are wind and solar. So state your case for gas in the main findings of the study you’ve done on it.

WAYNE GLOSSOP: I think you nailed it correctly with gas being a contentious issue. We saw that contentious issue really not getting resolved in the discussions out there in the market. So as Wärtsilä we undertook to do an analysis and we did it in a completely transparent manner, using a public-participation process.

We modelled the entire South African power system, and we wanted to try and find out the reality. Do we need gas, and if so what does this gas look like?

I think the main message is that the number one objective is that we need to be maximising our renewable energy, solar and wind, as far as possible. But to do that you need flexible technologies and there are two dominant flexible technologies that come out all the time in the modelling for the least-cost energy system – batteries, a lot of batteries, and gas, gas power.

So we see that we need approximately nine gigawatts of gas power over the next 10 to 19 years.

This is really counter-intuitive because you’re thinking, well, to reduce our system costs and reduce the emissions of the South African power system, we are saying that we need to add what’s known as a relatively expensive fossil fuel into the mix. But it turns out that if you add this one key ingredient into the energy mix, you come out with a cleaner and more cost-effective power system.

The way that it does this, it provides what we dub ‘flexible peaking capacity’ to the power system, which is really providing peaking support to the system, along with renewable balancing – and there’s a lot of seasonal support as well.

Then there’s a very important secondary function, which I think a lot of people tend to not ignore, but don’t fully acknowledge. This is what we call a ‘system contingency’ function.

In our modelling, we modelled a couple of scenarios where things don’t go according to plan, where we as a country don’t roll out certain programmes or we don’t get the coal availability we expect on the power system …

And when things go wrong this is where gas plays a very important role. So, for example, if the Koeberg generator is down for an extended period, six months, for whatever reason, gas is the technology that fills that gap for that six-month period.

Under perfect conditions it goes back to peaking sort of load-capacity factors. But when things go wrong, which they tend to do, as we have all foreseen in the last couple of years and months in the power system, gas is filling that gap to provide energy security to our power system.

FIFI PETERS: How different is the ideal scenario that you’ve sketched out in your research that highlights the respective roles of all agents in the Just Transition, wind, solar, batteries or gas? How different is what you’ve sketched out as an ideal scenario from the current government plan on the table?

WAYNE GLOSSOP: We modelled three scenarios. We modelled a planned world, which government outlined with the presidency in the IRP [Integrated Resource Plan], and we modelled a reality check, which is that some things might not happen on time, or they might not happen at all. And then we modelled the perfect world, where we just let the model do what it wants.

The plans are actually really well on track for what we see in the perfect world. I think it just needs more.

So we do see more gas, more flexible technologies [being] needed to support a higher renewable growth.

There are a lot of good plans out there to increase the amount of renewable energy, but if we don’t in parallel create or introduce the technologies that support that growth, we are not going to achieve our objective of a least-cost system and least emissions.

What we found in the model is that today coal and diesel are the primary energy balances for the power system, so you’ve got an extremely dirty fuel and an extremely expensive fuel.

If we don’t replace that with something more cost-effective and cleaner, like gas, we are going to continue to rely on those two technologies as we grow the renewables base, and we are not going to see the emission savings we hope to see; we’re not going to see the cost savings we hope to see that can be realised with a lot of renewables on our power system.

FIFI PETERS: All right. Thanks so much for breaking that down for us, and quite simply so. Wayne Glossop, the power systems engineer and senior business development manager at Wärtsilä, has been stating the role and the case for gas in successfully achieving the Just Transition to net-zero carbon emissions.