South Africa’s transition away from the dirtiest fossil fuel has been marred by the botched approach to the closure of a coal-fired power plant, the first under a key climate policy initiative.
When the last unit at Komati, one of the state-owned power utility’s oldest plants, was shut last October, little attempt had been made to consult with workers or create new jobs, the Presidential Climate Commission said in a new study. Ministers from the ruling African National Congress also made misleading claims about the potential for the facility to have remained open, aggravating tensions among the country’s coal-dependent communities.
Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. only began a study on the social impact of Komati’s closure in 2020, as it opened consultations with the government. It only started discussions with workers at Komati, east of Johannesburg, in May last year, as construction began on the first project to provide alternative jobs, a micro-grid container assembly plant. Five months later the power plant was shut.
Eskom first began planning to close Komati — commissioned in 1961 with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts — in 2017. At that time about 1,600 people worked at the plant, but five years later just one of Komati’s nine units was still operating, generating 121 megawatts. The commission said subsequent comments by the energy and electricity ministers that the plant shouldn’t have been closed given South Africa’s power shortage have caused confusion and were inaccurate, fanning community hopes that the facility would reopen. Eskom would always have had to close the plant as it was reaching the end of its operational life, it said.
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