Metro councils will have to scale up data collection and employ a systems approach to energy issues as cities face rising pressures in future.
This is according to various industry players speaking during a panel discussion at the Africa Energy Indaba, being held in Sandton this week.
Valerie Geen, director of the National Business Initiative's climate and energy unit, noted that the metro areas and big cities are the economic lifeblood of the country, and also its biggest sources of emissions.
“There's a need for leadership at the level of premiers' and mayors' offices that this is a fundamental concern for cities.”
She added that rapid urbanisation is making it increasingly important to look at city environments for energy leadership and savings. “Urbanisation is at 64% and fast heading for 70%, and cities are also the first port of call when disaster strikes. They are a hub for bringing together critical issues around sustainability in the country.”
Geen quoted Christiana Figueres, director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in stating that data collection “is to the future of business what the X-ray was to the then-future of medicine - without it, we would never have seen the insides of the patient's health”.
Geen explained that data collection gives city authorities greater insight into the nature of problems, so they can better respond. “It's a question of reliable data sets that give you granularity and show sector-wise how things look, rather than trying to create solutions when you don't know what the problem is.”
She added that city authorities needed to take a systems approach and not think about sustainability as an energy-only or transport-only concern. “They need to think in terms of related issues like revenue, skills, capacity and so forth.”
Hilton Trollip, principal engineer for the City of Cape Town, pointed out that cities are very different and require very different solutions. “Since 2002, Cape Town has put down very granulated data on energy supply and demand and created optimum energy future scenarios based on those analyses.”
He noted that the city's entire budget was around R21 billion, with electricity making up nearly a third of that. “So electricity is a massive part of the city's expenditure.”
Trollip added that Eskom and the Department of Energy have indicated that until 2026 the country was in an environment where reliability of energy supply couldn't be guaranteed. In addition, there are greenhouse gas considerations, and Trollip said Cape Town subscribed very strongly to the national policy of complying with emissions reduction targets.
Cape Town has a target of 10% reduction in electricity consumption by 2012, which Trollip said it has achieved, although this was mostly due to the recession. But he added that consumption levels haven't rebounded, probably due to the tariff hikes. The city has also set a target of 10% renewable and cleaner energy supply by 2020.
Apart from these goals, Cape Town has made several investments in energy efficiency, Trollip noted, through the retrofitting of traffic lights and buildings, and a large solar water heater programme being planned.
A major stumbling block, however, is rethinking the monetary value of implementations, he said, as the savings that come with efficiencies are often difficult to explain in a concrete sense. “One of the big problems is the idea of 'monetising a savings stream', because for investors it's very easy to monetise a profit stream, the profits are simply there, but it's hard to explain things in terms of money saved.
“Our whole financial system has been designed not to invest in energy efficiency, and also not to invest in solutions, which don't show benefits for three years,” Trollip added. “Successes in solar and wind all result in indirect losses in revenue for cities, and they're not designed to deal with that.”
Responding to a question from the audience, Trollip noted that the number of regulations and barriers to installing features like rain water harvesters or alternative energies in one's home was indicative of the country's historical approach regarding services.
“We come from an era of central distribution where the message was 'we will look after you', but we'll have to move to one where we take responsibility for our own energy efficiency, and that's going to require a shift in thinking, and also in regulations to enable that.
“We see a whole new world - it's not about sustaining what we have, it's about surviving and also extending services to those in the city who don't have access, and that calls for significant behaviour change.”
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