Having just returned from a conference on renewable energy in Dubai, Alan Winde was eager to share his enthusiasm for bringing these projects home to the Cape. But several glaring issues were made apparent in the course of the conference which the slick presentation from promoted energy generation partner Red Rocket could not paper over.

Faced with restrictions on new generation imposed by decades of ANC neglect of transformers and distribution centres, grid capacity is now 98% saturated, according to government spokesperson Alwie Lester. With Bid Round 7 approaching, only a tiny sliver of new generation capacity can be added to the Cape grid, which covers the Northern and Eastern Cape provinces as well.

New generation projects require the licensing permission of Eskom, which has so far failed to expand the grid, and at the best of times, expansions of local grid capacity can take upwards of 12-18 months.

In the mean time, Lester affirmed that electricity tariffs will be increasing for consumers across the Western Cape. This comes in the context of Alan Winde's remarks toward the end of the presentation that the provincial budget is extremely constrained by Treasury policy.

The province only receives approximately 3% of its revenue from own sources, with the remaining 97% coming from government funds distributed by the national Treasury.

While Winde promised that the new generation projects would more than make up for the amount of power the province uses, it is also connected to the rest of the country, with whom we share our own power. This means that Western Cape ratepayers will now be subsidising the energy usage for the rest of the country.

Upon being asked why the DA-run provincial department had not started addressing loadshedding in 2009 when they took charge, Winde explained that among the first legal opinions he sought upon taking office as head of Finance and Economy was regarding the ability of the province to generate its own electricity.

The DA's legal department said that they had no legal right to do so, and rather than test the boundaries, the party chose not to act - Winde cited the party's trust in the ANC's promises at the time to deliver on promises to upgrade the electrical grid.

In the following political cycle, Winde took the initiative to develop Green Cape, a development programme to build industrial capacity for green energy manufacturers, while he waited on the rest of the party to take the initiative on generation.

However, Winde's focus on renewable energy is rather narrow, and while understandably driven by global trends, it overlooks certain critical risks which are amplified in our present situation.

The new electrical generation projects on offer are almost entirely solar- and wind-based. Considering the wild fluctuations in energy generation for these intermittent sources, sever curtailment policies and massive battery storage options will have to become available, to provide the peak shaving and shortage-avoiding adjustments that can result.

These sources also run the risk of overloading the local grid at present.

But when questioned on their intentions to explore more stable sources of electricity, such as the offer by André Pienaar's C5 to build small pebble-bed nuclear reactors, Sharif Harris, spokesperson for the energy partner Red Rocket, said they had no intention of moving away from the main business model they have been pursuing so far.

Winde said they are looking at Pienaar's offer, but that the initial capital outlay for this form of energy was very steep, while the Lazard calculations for the per-unit cost of wind and solar are falling dramatically.

This is a popular consensus, but the calculations for these energy sources hide many manufacturing layers, and are not consistent in their methodology across each energy source category.

The costing methodology specifically excludes the costs of "network upgrades, transmission, congestion or other integration-related costs". In the case of the Cape grid system, this is a significant oversight, especially considering the great amount of variability in power these renewable sources produce, particularly wind.

According to data from the OECD, the grid connection costs for wind farms and solar parks exceed the grid connection costs for traditional energy generation by an order of magnitude:

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The "levellised" costing methodology, while friendly to solar and wind producers (and to the rather sillier hydrogen fuel cell projects), are increasingly under scrutiny from senior financing experts, such as Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management:

““levelised costs” comparing wind and solar power to fossil fuels are misleading barometers of the pace of change. Levelised cost estimates rarely include actual costs that high renewable grid penetration requires: (a) investment in transmission to create larger renewable coverage areas, (b) backup thermal power required for times when renewable generation is low, and (c) capital costs and maintenance of utility-scale battery storage. I am amazed at how much time is spent on this frankly questionable levelised cost statistic.”

The same JP Morgan report linked and quoted above also demonstrates the cost in damages to the grid, which is not only a risk for flimsy and outdated grids such as South Africa's, but even first-world economies such as the USA and UK:

Aversion to "fossil fuels" may be understandable, but aversion to nuclear can be partially explained by the irrational moral panic in the West, led by Angela Merkel's government in Germany, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which was caused by a combination earthquake and tsunami. But most of us do not live on the planet's most active tectonic fissure as Japan does.

Nuclear is widely regarded as one of the safest and least-polluting sources of energy, and with new technologies increasing the modularity of generation, allowing smaller and smaller stations to be built, it is increasingly becoming an attractive option.

Additionally, there is an increasing global attention to the externalised costs of "renewables", including their enormous upstream pollution, caused mainly by the rather destructive mining processes which go into the extraction of the unique combination of minerals they require.

Solar and wind also take up an enormous amount of land, while nuclear is by far the most efficient in terms of mining impact, physical construction footprint, and energy density.

While I applaud the current efforts to provide additional generation capacity, it seems to me that the long term costs of the energy sources chosen could be hidden from Winde and his fellow policymakers behind the levellised costing quotes, and that this province would be well-served by taking André Pienaar's modular nuclear reactor offer seriously.

Because what is cheap now, is often expensive later, as the DA leadership has discovered in their attempt to avoid legal costs 14 years ago.