Resources investment company Menar MD Vuslat Bayoglu has emphasised that South Africa is on the precipice of a significant industrial revolution.
Fuelling this revolution, however, will require a consistent and reliable baseload power source that can only be produced by coal-fired power stations, despite calls from more developed countries for South Africa to reduce its coal-fired power station capacity to achieve sustainability and carbon dioxide emission reduction goals, he said on the first day of the Southern African Coal Processing Society International Coal Conference, in Secunda, Mpumalanga, on August 15.
He pointed to the impact of Russia’s war, in Ukraine, on the prices of food, energy and other commodities globally. “We have this overlapping crisis affecting many parts of Africa in terms of energy security, including reversing the positive trends in terms of improving access to modern energy. There are also difficulties in terms of access to utilities in different African countries.
“There are about 1.3-billion people globally without electricity, and about 600-million of those people are from sub–Saharan Africa,” he said.
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