Some of the SADC head of states

WITH climate change posing one of the major threats to humanity’s shared interests in southern Africa, the region has been plunged into a dilemma as to how it could wiggle out of an impending energy crisis as it seeks to address the global warming phenomenon.
Nations in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) depend on fossil fuels such as oil and coal that are being condemned, globally, for their high pollution levels.
They are also reliant on hydro-electricity, which is under threat from drying rivers as the regional climate gets warmer.
While hydro-electricity is a clean and renewable source of energy, the increasingly irregular rainfall patterns have made river water no longer a sustainable source of energy.
And already feeling the heat are Zambia and Zimbabwe. The two countries share part of the Zambezi River and exclusively own the massive water body, Lake Kariba, which is a critical source of power for the two countries.
The Zambezi River Authority, responsible for the management of the basin from which the two neighbours draw water for hydro-electricity, has been forced to reduce water allocation for electricity generation from 45 billion cubic metres per annum to 33 billion cubic metres due to dwindling supplies as the mighty Zambezi River’s major tributaries, upstream of Kariba, dry up.
The poor inflows have triggered a record drop in the 280km-long lake’s level following a prolonged drought in southern Africa, resulting in a 400 megawatt (MW) plunge in electricity supplies from Kariba Power Station.
Zambia has already cut generation by 300MW and has warned its citizens that this could further go down by as much as 600MW as the Kariba water situation gets worse in the next months.
By August the situation will have worsened when most of Zambezi River’s tributaries run completely dry.
Regional economic powerhouse, South Africa, has not been spared by the power crisis.
Thus, coal and oil, roundly condemned for high carbon emission which is a major catalyst for warming global temperatures, are now the only available alternatives.
With projections of a future global economy likely to consume more energy, especially with the rising energy demand by developing countries, the effects of fossil fuels on climate change is increasingly becoming a major talking point among environmentalists, energy experts and even governments.
Never before has the costs and consequences of climate change become so topical an issue in the underdeveloped world, where the delicate adjustment to the use of cleaner sources of energy, other than hydro-electricity, has never been an issue.
With the developed world fast promoting renewable energy from water, wind, waves, solar and biomass, developing countries, such as those in SADC, are now caught up in a complex energy crisis because they are unable to exploit the new sources of energy.
But many argue that southern Africa is capable of harnessing these clean energy sources and gradually phase out fossils.
What lacks, they say, is political will.
“For the first time in history we face an energy crisis not because we might run out of energy, but because we are using it in the wrong way. Up to now the energy industry was judged by two metrics: Its contribution to energy security and the cost of energy delivered to the consumer. To this we must now add a third: Its success in reducing the emission of ecologically harmful gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere,” said energy expert Panganai Sithole, director of the Zimbabwe Energy Council.
“We need to address this crisis in two dimensions, demand management of power and ensuring energy efficiency, through a well coordinated energy policy. For example, it has been established that in Zimbabwe, 40 percent of domestic power consumption is by geysers that can be easily replaced by solar water heaters, although mainly rich families can afford it.
“In the energy policy, we can simply make it mandatory that all low density houses should have solar water heaters and help them by removing import duty on the alternative energy sources. It does not take any money for government to implement this. Imagine the amount of power we could save with this policy,” he added, while encouraging the Zimbabwe government to court investments in renewable energy and allow independent power producers the opportunity to easily get into the power production business.
“We are not even harnessing solar as a source of power despite the amount of sun we get. There has been endless talk of a solar power plant in Gwanda but we haven’t seen its progress years after it was launched. Gas, for example, attracts serious investment everywhere in the world. Mozambique is realising the benefit of its investment policies and we are importing supplementary power from there,” Sithole said.
However, other energy experts think differently, arguing that the environmental concerns around power generation were being pushed by rich countries at the expense of developing countries.
Founder of Harare-based energy firm, Energy and Information Logistics, Francis Masawi, noted: “Rich countries complain about it yet they managed to achieve their development using coal and oil and they can now afford the expensive alternative sources.
“True, solar is available but the technology is not sufficient here. We must be allowed to utilise the resources we have and when we have developed to their levels, we can start talking the same language and start thinking about the expensive clean energy they are talking about.”
The great divide among imperative dynamic forces behind climate alleviation is very precarious and threatens the collective global climate action around the world.
And despite what many climate action groups advocate for, energy experts looking at capacities of all technologies seem not to see a realistic possibility for a rapid shift into 100 percent renewable energy any time soon.
They have several scenarios for the future of energy production in light of climate change mitigation, and they all include increasing nuclear power as a renewable energy source, something which has already sharply divided opinion as some feel the answer to climate change is not nuclear power.
There are worries peculiar to uranium such as its radiation problems and its capacity to make nuclear weapons that make it a major source of global conflict.