Providing Emergency Power in National Energy Systems: South Africa's Risk Mitigation Programme is Costly and Environmentally Disastrous

Much of South Africa's existing coal fleet is beyond its service life, and attempts to bring new capacity into the system have been hit by extensive delays and costly overruns. As a consequence, there is a significant supply constraint which is predicted to continue until at least 2025, a crisis which precipitated the introduction of the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (RMI4P). The bid outcomes of the RMI4P have highlighted an intrinsic weakness with the concept of independent, distributed electricity generation. Isolated units which are unable to balance supply/demand profiles across the whole system will by necessity incur higher cost. In this article, it is shown that a system wide programme which allowed for energy wheeling between operators with complementary supply profiles, would have been a 25% lower cost option for energy consumers, and reduced carbon emissions from 349 kg carbon dioxide/MWh to zero.