It may be hard to believe, but the core ingredient of the thousands of solar panels that have helped lift South Africa out of load-shedding is the most common commodity imaginable — sand. OK, quartz sand. Quartz is a sort of rusted, oxidised, silicon and there’s lots of it here. We make cement with it.
But if ANC policy is any guide, the cabinet lekgotla this coming week will spend hours debating why we don’t make solar panels here, in this country. Why can’t we “beneficiate” our own sand?
The probable answer is that it is difficult and expensive. The Chinese make about 90% of the silicon wafers that, placed between transparent panels, will generate a charge if light is focused on it. You have to heat it to around 2,000°C. The oxygen in the “rust” then reacts with the carbon in the coke you’re heating to make a residue that is then distilled to a fabulous degree of purity.
This year the world (mainly the Chinese again) will produce about 70-billion silicon “wafers”. None of them here sadly. And no-one even wants our quartz to “exploit”. But the solar revolution has barely started. There are about 10,00km2 of solar panels in the world now, already providing more electricity than the US used in the boom years after World War 2. While that’s just 6% of global electricity use, the growth is breathtaking.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa gathers his colourful new cabinet next week, will it even talk about artificial intelligence and the real transformation of all of our lives?
The Economist quotes Michael Liebreich, a clean energy economist, saying that it took all of 2004 to install a gigawatt of solar power. Eskom’s Kusile power station, for example, is designed to supply 4.5GW. In 2010 1GW took a month and in 2016 a week. This year will see close to 2GW installed every day. In 10 years solar will be able to provide more energy than coal or gas.
In South Africa the state has overseen the installation of, or approval for, around just 0.15GW in the last 5 years and it has just imposed a 10% import duty on Chinese solar panels. It wants to encourage the growth of a domestic solar panel industry. The move explains the absurd magical thinking of ANC policy and also why it makes no progress and creates so few new jobs.
Our inability to come to terms with economic reality is staggering. The EU, our single largest trading partner by value, is going to impose a carbon “border tax” on, first, selected and then many more imports from 2026. So the steel we make using coal-fired electricity will face new import taxes. Other big economies will follow — their consumers will simply demand it no matter the ideology of their governments. We are going to formally complain, and it was worrying to hear the DA’s new environment minister, Dion George, playing tough on TV the other day, warning that we would not be “pushed around”. But no-one is trying to do that.
We are simply victims of our own blinkered policy as we try constantly to reinvent wheels others have already made for us. It shouldn’t matter what we use to make clean energy. What matters is that our exports are made using it. If South African steel is a target now, soon it will be oranges irrigated or textiles woven using coal power. No-one cares about our “special complexities”, to quote George, and the government seems to think that as long as it sticks to international climate change agreements on pollution it is OK. It isn’t. We are way too slow, and way too precious. A new world is hurtling towards us at a frightening speed.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa gathers his colourful new cabinet next week, will it even talk about artificial intelligence and the real transformation of all of our lives? AI will be able to compute all humanly thinkable possibilities in the blink of an eye by 2030. Children born in Mqanduli today will have access to it all, and in isiXhosa, from the day they start school.
None of our jobs are safe. AI is the single biggest thing to happen to humans since the first industrial revolution. It will diagnose diseases and prescribe treatments for every individual South African. And quickly too. It will generate thousands of cheaper new ways to make semiconductor wafers to capture the sun’s energy. We simply have no idea and no plan, and there is nothing in any of the party manifestos so recently cobbled together for the elections for our comfort.
The only way to start anew is with a cold and clear-eyed stocktaking of where we will be in five years’ time. How will we create new wealth in 2030?
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