The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) Principal Engineer, Jarrad Wright, says government is showing commitment to renewable energy.
His comments come after the CSIR together with other institutions authored a study which demonstrated that in the future 100% of energy will come from renewables.
The research reveals that renewables-led energy system is technically feasible and recent technology cost developments for solar and wind have made it economically viable.
This in contrast to a study last year that doubted the viability of many of the recent scenarios for high shares of renewable energy, questioning everything from whether renewables-based systems can survive extreme weather events with low sun and low wind and the ability to keep the grid stable with so much variable generation.
Wright says government’s commitment to renewable energy is shown by the roll out of the Renewable Energy Independent Procurement Program.
He says, “I think going forward it’s very important to realise that if we want to make sure that renewable energy is as inclusive as possible we need to think really seriously about distributed energy for communities, community owned projects, individually owned energy sources as opposed to the large utility scale projects.”
“In the future I think , serious policy options to enable South Africa to generate the power and to own that energy need to be adopted in the future as opposed to a lot of international investments coming in and doing it for us,” he adds.
Wright says in South Africa, there is a possibility of a 70-90% penetration of renewable energy, such as solar and wind in the future.
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