[imagesource: Shutterstock]

Not to poke a sleeping bear, but it’s been a good few months since our last round of load shedding.

It’s always lurking, though, and not even ministers on live TV are safe from its wrath.

The latest badge of shame has nothing to do with load shedding and relates to a damning report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

According to CREA, Eskom has become the world’s biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide, a pollutant that has been linked to a range of ailments including asthma and heart attacks.

Business Day reporting below:

Eskom produced 1,600 kilotonnes of the pollutant in 2019, the latest year for which comparable data is available, according to the report released on Tuesday by CREA, an air pollution research organisation. That was more than any company, and the total emissions of the power sector of any country with the exception of India.

While China, the US and the EU have slashed sulphur dioxide emissions in recent years by fitting pollution abatement equipment to power plants, Eskom has done so at only one of its 15 coal-fired facilities.

A 2019 study went as far as to link emissions from Eskom to in excess of 2 000 deaths a year.

The World Health Organisation says that South Africa’s air quality levels exceed safe limits.

Part of the problem is due to the high sulphur content of the coal Eskom burns, with emissions from 15 coal-fired power plants in South Africa more than twice as high as those from 249 coal-fired plants in the US.

In order to cut sulphur dioxide emissions, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at CREA, says Eskom would need to spend somewhere between R100 billion and R200 billion fitting plants with flue-gas desulphurisation units.

That’s tricky, given that it’s already about R400 billion in debt, and the country is well and truly gatvol of digging into our back pockets to try and correct decades of criminal mismanagement and neglect.

There are thousands of examples to illustrate that, including recent revelations that Eskom paid up to R80 000 for a set of knee guards that cost between R100 and R300 at hardware stores.

One supplier admitted that they had paid around R4 000 for knee guards, but charged Eskom R934 000.

[source:busday]