tiistai 23. syyskuuta 2014

Number of the day is 8. Russian based conglomerate Rosatom is building 8 nuclear power units to South Africa

Rosatom is supplying 8 nuclear power units to South Africa, writes the legendary Russian ITAR-TASS today. These power plants are to produce 9600 megawatts to the power-hungry emerging country by 2030. Currently South Africa and the entire continent of Africa has one nuclear power plant supplying about 5% of the country's need. South Africa is the second largest economy on the continent after Nigeria. The nuclear power plant is here in Cape Town, just a stone throw away from our beautiful Cape Winelands in Koeberg, right by the Atlantic beaches.

What makes this news significant, is it's impact regionally. It is eye-opening, because the entire emerging Southern African region economic growth has been stagnated for years due to lack of affordable electricity. The hikes in electricity prices have exceeded any other inflation by almost three fold. Moreover, even huge economic hubs and emerging cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg have been subject to continuous blackouts. Huge investments have therefore been made into natural gas, coal and even clean tech green solutions like solar and hydro energy all across the region. 9,6 billion USD railroad from Botswana coal mines to the coast of Namibia, multi-billion Norwegian investments in Angola, hundreds of millions for natural gas drilling in Namibia. Those are just to name a few. The Russians have been active everywhere, whether it's with their traditional allies in Mozambique and Angola or the Kudu gas fields in Namibia. The big question is, what is going to happen to these projects now that Russians scored big elsewhere? Are they going to whither away as unprofitable and South Africa will continue to supply the entire region just straight from the grid? Or are they going to go forward and the region is going to become not only the area for extremely cheap labor, but also World record affordable energy.

Most regional countries are to renew their agreements to decades to come with South African ESKOM this year and the coming. This - I am sure - is not by co-incidence. The talks have been postponing from 2012 already and it now makes sense why. South Africa needed to secure their own interest first and the Russians played at many fronts. The situation is best described with the saying: first come, first served. Southern Africa has abundance of resources, but few are utilized up to now.

They say that the originally Gasprom owned Kudu gas fields in Namibia or the Angolan-Norwegian cooperation for the hydro-energy in South-Eastern Angola could both alone electrify the entire region for decades to come. But how is this new situation going to now alter the market and the viability of those projects. What if these 8 new nuclear power plants, these other projects and the new found natural gas in Mozambique are all going to be harnessed? We'll get electricity for free or we'll start selling it to the World or to the rest of the continent. Electrical main grid makers wake up! They say that the population in Africa could five fold in the next 85 years. Economies grow faster than anywhere in the World.

The potential in Africa are just mind-blowing. One must just hope that the decisions just be sufficiently forward thinking.