Lucy Baker

The Political Economy of Energy Transitions: The Case of South Africa

This paper explores the political economy of energy transition in South Africa. An economic model based around a powerful ‘minerals-energy complex’ that has previously been able to provide domestic and foreign capital with cheap and plentiful coal-generated electricity is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable. The paper analyses the struggle over competing energy visions, infrastructures and political agendas in order to generate insights into the governance and financing of clean energy transitions in South Africa. It provides both a rich empirical account of key policy developments aimed at enabling such a transition and provides reflections on how best to theorise the contested politics of energy transitions.

African elephants show high levels of interest in the skulls and ivory of their own species.

An important area of biology involves investigating the origins in animals of traits that are thought of as uniquely human. One way that humans appear unique is in the importance they attach to the dead bodies of other humans, particularly those of their close kin, and the rituals that they have developed for burying them. In contrast, most animals appear to show only limited interest in the carcasses or associated remains of dead individuals of their own species. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are unusual in that they not only give dramatic reactions to the dead bodies of other elephants, but are also reported to systematically investigate elephant bones and tusks that they encounter, and it has sometimes been suggested that they visit the bones of relatives. Here, we use systematic presentations of object arrays to demonstrate that African elephants show higher levels of interest in elephant skulls and ivory than in natural objects or the skulls of other large terrestrial mammals. However, they do not appear to specifically select the skulls of their own relatives for investigation so that visits to dead relatives probably result from a more general attraction to elephant remains.

Renewable energy in South Africa's minerals-energy complex: a ‘low carbon’ transition?

This paper questions the extent to which the introduction of utility-scale, privately generated renewable energy into South Africas coal-dominated electricity supply can be considered a ‘low-carbon transition’. Rather, the renewable energy projects in question are embedded within and contribute to South Africas high-carbon, electricity-intensive ‘minerals–energy complex’. An empirical consideration is provided of some of the stakeholders involved in the implementation of the wind industry in South Africa, and the possibilities and pitfalls for its long-term sustainability.

Tensions in the transition: the politics of electricity distribution in South Africa

This paper argues that the distribution of electricity represents an important yet neglected aspect of the politics of energy transitions. In recent years, South Africa’s electricity sector has seen the introduction of new actors and technologies, including the ‘prosumer’ (producer–consumer) of electricity and small-scale embedded generation from roof-top solar photovoltaics. We analyse these recent developments in historical context and consider implications for contemporary planning, regulation and ownership of electricity. We find that the reconfiguration of electricity distribution faces significant political and economic challenges that are rooted in the country’s socio-economic and racial inequalities and its heavy dependence on coal-fired power. First small-scale embedded generation offers potential opportunities for affordable, decentralised, low-carbon energy, yet disruption to the coal-powered electric grid and the monopoly of South Africa’s electricity utility has been minimal to date. Second, small-scale embedded generation creates tensions between equitable and low-carbon energy transitions and threatens critical revenue from the country’s wealthy consumers that cross-subsidises electricity services for the poor and other municipal public services. Third, the South African experience queries common assumptions about the democratic potential of decentralised governance. Fourth, South Africa provides insights of global significance into how political institutions have responded to social and technological drivers of change, in a context where planning and regulation have followed rather than led infrastructural developments. While energy policy remains unresponsive or resistant to social and technological change, there remain significant political, economic, technical and regulatory challenges to a just and inclusive energy transition.

The politics of procurement and the low-carbon transition in South Africa

This chapter examines recent developments in the South African electricity sector. The largely coal-fired sector accounts for 45 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and is dominated by the state-owned monopoly utility Eskom. Since the introduction of private power producers in 2011, investment in utility scale renewable energy projects has started to make a small but significant contribution to supply, providing competitive alternatives to Eskom generation. The chapter outlines how electricity policy is embedded within long-standing political and economic forces, and subject to diverse and often conflicting interests. The chapter develops an analytical framework that links the literature on socio-technical transitions with that of the political economy of electricity. The South African case highlights that energy transitions are not merely about technological choices, but are embedded in institutional arrangements that may have unintended consequences or may be borne of broader political struggles that go beyond climate change considerations and indeed may limit the potential for transformation of the sector.

Commercial-Scale Renewable Energy in South Africa and its Progress to Date

While South Africa’s electricity sector is heavily coal-dependent, the country has recently become an attractive destination for commercial‑scale renewable energy investment. This article examines ongoing developments and challenges to the country’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers’ Procurement Programme (RE IPPPP), from inception as a feed-in tariff in 2007, to its launch as a competitive bidding programme in 2011. The article discusses how the programme emerged out of a set of national conditions combined with international trends in renewable energy investment and technology development. The programme’s successes include progressive requirements for socioeconomic development. However, since 2016, South Africa’s renewable energy industry has faced complex challenges, including resistance by the electricity utility Eskom, itself embroiled within scandals of state capture and corruption, as well as the ability of Eskom’s transmission grid to integrate renewable energy generation. Subsequent delays to the programme have generated uncertainty for stakeholders and the future of the industry.

Sustainability transitions and the politics of electricity planning in South Africa

After decades of cheap, abundant coal-fired electricity, from which large international mining and energy conglomerates and wealthy households have benefitted disproportionately, South Africa is experiencing a supplyside crisis. In 2011, the country’s first integrated resource plan for electricity (IRP) was promulgated following a prolonged and contested consultation process throughout 2010. This plan anticipates that renewable energy will constitute twenty per cent of installed generation capacity by 2030, which will deliver approximately nine per cent of supply. Coal will retain the greatest share alongside a potential yet currently uncertain nuclear fleet. The objectives of this chapter are twofold: to examine electricity governance in South Africa and the highly politicized policy-making process in relation to IRP in which vested interests have played a major role; and to consider the extent to which the IRP has facilitated a low carbon transition. The chapter finds that despite the creation of a successful renewable energy ‘niche’, the coal-fired ‘regime’ is also being reinforced and the electricity mix under analysis is fuelling an unsustainable trajectory of production and consumption. The chapter also considers definitions of sustainability and concepts of a ‘just’ transition.

Technology Development in South Africa: The Case of Wind and Solar PV

This paper examines the political economy of technology development in the context of South Africa’s emerging utility-scale, privately generated renewable energy sector. Focussing on the wind and solar PV industries, the paper explores how international dynamics in manufacturing, investment and trade that involve increasingly global industries, are interacting with territorial factors embedded within South Africa’s unique economic, social and political context. While South Africa’s renewable energy industry has been celebrated internationally, there are tensions between commercial priorities, and requirements for economic development including local content. The paper merges perspectives from global production networks and the literature on technological innovation in low and middle income countries in order to analyse the potential for the development of innovative capabilities in South Africa’s renewable energy sector. The paper provides rich empirical content including challenges to the definition and implementation of local content requirements, as well as the involvement of key national and international actors.

Mark Swilling and Eve Annecke: Just transitions: explorations of sustainability in an unfair world

In Just Transitions, Swilling and Annecke address the global challenge of bringing about a transition that is at once ‘‘just’’ and ‘‘low-carbon’’. Their book has relevance for academic theorists, practitioners, town planners and community-builders alike who are concerned with the realisation of equitable low-carbon development. For the authors, such a transition must be based on a mode of production that is not dependent on resource depletion and environmental degradation, and must also tackle widening global socio-economic inequalities in terms of consumption and access to power. Addressing the elephant in the room in governance terms, such a transition will require ‘‘deep structural changes’’ and ‘‘extensive interventions by capable developmental states’’. Their perspective on governance is about minimisation as well as restoration, reconstruction and redistributive justice. The book’s starting point reflects the authors’ experiences as co-creators of the Lynedoch Eco-Village in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where they have lived for 14 years. Drawing particularly but not exclusively on empirical examples from South Africa, one of the most unequal societies in the world despite its rich resource endowment, Just Transitions addresses a huge gap in the low-carbon transitions literature, which as the authors identify has to date provided limited examples from lowto middle-income countries and focused largely on Europe. In doing so, it has failed to consider national contexts with weak or failed states and assumes national contexts with democratic governance, wellestablished markets and the capacity for technological innovation. Interweaving a diverse literature that includes complexity theory (Cilliers 1998), ecological economics (Costanza 2008), technological innovation (Perez 2002), Marxist and Keynesian economics and socio-ecological systems (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007), this book challenges the assumption that a low-carbon transition will automatically have concomitant social benefits or, in other words, that they will automatically be ‘‘just’’. The book expands on the three main concepts of transitions in the sustainability literature, namely the social innovations approach, the multi-level perspective (Grin et al. 2010) and the resilience approach (cf, Westley et al. 2011), by taking account of wider global dynamics. These include the tension between global inequality and global