THE GREEN PARTY WILL
Set up renewable energy only in localised areas . This will allow for the removal of hundreds of kilometres of wiring and electricity could be free except for a small maintenance cost once it is installed. This would take a maximum of 5 years.
- E.g. Cape Town’s 2012 needs of 10.2 GW could be supplied by solar panels alone on 31 km2 of roof tops, pumped up and stored in dams for night time hydro generation, which would cost at today’s’ GW store watt price R 28 billion.
( probably a bulk price would be lower) :
- This could be recovered at about R 13 billion a year at today’s Domestic 1 rate.
After that electricity could be almost free. And no blackouts.
ENERGY SOURCES USED BY THE NATS AND THE ANC :
NUCLEAR POWER
- Extremely harmful to the planet. The nuclear waste has no safe place to be disposed and is harmful for at least 10 000 years causing death, deformities and birth defects.
- Nuclear energy uses more oil-based energy to produce than you get from it ( i.e. to mine the uranium and plutonium, dispose of dangerous tailings far from human habitation and then dispose of the depleted uranium.)
- Very expensive, unreliable, overruns all cost estimates. Runs without insurance against a disaster because the cost of insuring against damage so extreme is impossible to cover viably.
- No real reason to use nuclear power. In fact very dangerous and foolish to use it. Unless your government has vested financial interests as ours has.
- Nuclear waste is being stored at Koeberg and not in the deep trenches that it is meant to be moved to. If a tsunami hits ( which will happen when the West Coast Antarctic Ice sheet breaks off and falls into the sea) the whole Western cape will be uninhabitable for 10 000 years or more.
COAL POWER
South Africa is the highest carbon producer per capita in the world, due to the use of low grade coal for power at distances far from the users.
It takes huge amounts of carbon dioxide producing vehicles to extract the coal, a lot of rock for a little coal. This has to be carried far to be used, carried in fossil fuel using vehicles. If the power is produced in Phalaborwa, it dissipates almost 80% en route to the users along the lines. This energy is very foolish as it is producing huge amounts of carbon dioxide for little energy and this carbon dioxide is warming the planet beyond what it can sustain.
DIESEL, PETROL AND GAS (big causes of global warming)
Oil, from which petrol, diesel gas is refined, is the bodies of plants and animals that lived billions of years ago, took the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to turn them into a carbohydrate of their own body, then because they died, they were covered with other bodies or silt, they did not rot, therefore holding the old carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for all that time. By burning them we return the carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and so once again we are regaining the atmosphere we used to have billions of years ago when most of the species on earth today could not survive because of the heat.
To prevent further global warming which will lead to the extinction of ourselves and many other species by the end of this century, we need to stop using fossil fuel and try and reverse what we have done.
BIOFUELS
This energy source is recent and perhaps one of the most foolish things Man has ever done. Biofuels are grown with chemical monoculture which is in itself extremely environmentally damaging, responsible for the poisoning of our seas, rivers, and underground water supplies with the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers.
Also responsible for the loss of our topsoil and in tropical forests is setting free the carbon dioxide that has been locked away from circulation in the atmosphere for thousands of years as peat ( basically pickled trees).
The energy required to produce and transport the fertilisers and pesticides, the tractors, the transporting and the burning make almost all biofuels NOT A NET GENERATOR OF ENERGY BUT A NET USER.