Coal provides most of South Africa's energy but its main concern is boosting supply, not going green.
BBC Africa business reporter, Johannesburg
Despite being Africa's most developed economy, the country has been experiencing load-shedding - or an organised series of rolling blackouts - for the past 15 years. But this outage felt like something new. Eskom has 14 coal-fired power stations, which produce around 80% of the country's power. Most of them are old, inefficient and prone to breakdowns.
In October, the 1,000MW Komati power station in Mpumalanga province became the first to shut down. On the positive side, Komati will be repurposed into a renewable energy generation site using solar and wind power, and it has already secured funding of nearly $500m from the World Bank to finance the project.
Some progress has been made. Speaking at a recent wind energy conference in Cape Town, Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said that IPP projects had created more than 6,000MW of electricity capacity.In 2020, just 7% of the country's energy came from renewable sources, according to the International Energy Agency.The country is among the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, such as the carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired power stations.
Its success or failure could influence whether or not other developing nations decide to decarbonise their economies.Solar farms as well as other sources of renewable energy are getting investment in South Africa In the meantime, the country is looking at another fossil fuel to answer the immediate problem of not having enough power.
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