At the invitation of the South African Free Market Foundation, this writer spent 16 days in South Africa, a country of intense interest for students of energy: Without a drop of crude, boycotted by the Arab oil suppliers, and treated by the rest of the world as a leper, it not only has no lines at the gasoline pumps, but it produces enough energy to sustain an economic boom mocking the self-inflicted recession in the Western world.
Beyond that, South Africa is of paramount importance in at least two related aspects: It is a giant in minerals; and it is the one and only strategic fort left along the lifeline from the Persian Gulf to West Europe and America. Both have a bearing on the subject discussed in the editorial above.
Current fashion dictates speaking about race at the mere mention of South Africa, and we wish we had the space for it; not to defend apartheid, but to point out the hypocrisy of those who rave against South Africa because it has democracy for whites only while they prostrate themselves before countries that have democracy for nobody; and to explain why it is that South Africa's non-white population has political rights that the Soviet serfs cannot even dream of¾and it is only fair to compare the dying vestiges of colonialism in Africa with its full bloom in the Soviet Empire.
A country's energy figures always mirror the level of its economy, and in the case of South Africa the mirror stunningly reveals its level in relation to the rest of the continent: It produces 60% of the electricity generated on the entire African continent, though it contains only some 5% of its population. Electricity provides some 20% of the country's energy requirements, and the figure is expected to double in the 1990's; the present growth rate is no less than 10% a year. (In the US, the fraction is about 23% and the growth rate is now below 4%.)
Virtually all of the electric power is coal-fired; some hydropower is imported from neighboring Mozambique, and a 1,800 MW nuclear plant is under construction near Capetown¾among other reasons to relieve a 1,000 mile transmission line from the coalfields in the north.
There are many impressive energy projects in the country, for example, a 1,000 MW pumped storage plant now under construction inside a mountain; it also doubles as an irrigation project to divert water to the other side of a mountain range. But two projects struck us as particularly interesting for Americans.
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Vol. 8, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 8 Issue/No.: Vol. 8, No. 2 Date: October 01, 1980 04:08 PM Title: Phase Three
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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