Repurposing South Africa’s Retiring Coal-Fired Power Stations for Renewable Energy Generation: A Techno-Economic Analysis

Abstract

South Africa is one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world, but it is presently experiencing an energy crisis, as its utility company cannot meet the country’s energy demands. The use of renewable energy sources and retiring of coal-fired power stations are two important ways of alleviating this problem, as well as decarbonizing the grid. Repurposing retiring coal-fired power stations for renewable energy generation (RCP-RES) while maintaining energy sustainability and reliability has rarely been researched. This paper proposes macro- and microelements for repurposing retiring coal-fired power stations for renewable energy generation in Camden with the aim of improving power generation through a low-carbon system. In this model, concentrated solar power (CSP) and solar photovoltaics (SPV), in combination with storage technologies (STs), were employed for RCP-RES, owing to their excellent levels of availability in the retiring fleet regions. The simulation results show that the power densities of CSP and SPV are significantly lower compared with retiring a coal-fired power plant (CFPP). Both are only able to generate 8.4% and 3.84% rated capacity of the retired CFPP, respectively. From an economic perspective, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) analysis indicates that CSP is significantly cheaper than coal technology, and even cheaper when considering SPV with a storage system.

Return of Coal: A Short Visit or a Long Stay?

“…Repurposing is accompanied by a long list of associated problems for various stakeholders: employment and revenue losses, grid intermittency, decommissioning costs, loss of industrial facilitation and many more, as identified by Chattopadhyay et al (2021). Although examples are not numerous, research has shown that there might still be prospects for developing countries to repurpose old inefficient coal plants (Jindal & Shrimali, 2022;Nogaya et al, 2022), but the options and details should be considered using a holistic approach. Since not all coal plants are repurposed, recent years revealed the opposite trend -to reopen them as an alternative to natural gas in developed economies.…”

Machine Learning Approach to Identify Important Parameters Influencing Pumping Load Shift in a Complex Dewatering System of a Deep-Level Mine

“…Considered hyperparameters: {'learning_rate': [0.03, 0.05, 0.1], 'max_depth': [3,5,7,10], 'min_child_weight': [2,4,6], 'nthread': [4], 'subsample': [0.5, 0.7, 0.9], 'colsample_bytree': [0.6, 0.7, 0.8], 'n_estimators': [300, 500, 700]} and the results from GridSearchCV were as follows:…”

“…Due to electricity crises and rising electricity costs in South Africa, the mining sector is compelled to find ways to be more energy-efficient and energy cost-conscious [6,7]. In South Africa, energy tariffs vary according to the time of use (TOU).…”