Turn rhetoric into action

the uncertainty on the development and use of renewable energy solutions starting with the controversy surrounding the Chisumbanje ethanol project.
Then, renewables must be galvanised as a key driver for future green economic development. This is important for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and achieving low carbon development, now a major economic paradigm in the face of climate change and global warming. It would be crucial also for diluting the national energy balance, which according to available statistics that are 12 years old, leaned disproportionately towards non-renewable energy sources.
In the year 2000, Zimbabwe’s energy balance stood at 53 percent woodfuel, 20 percent coal, liquid fuels 14 percent and 13 percent for electricity.
However, the level of investment in the low-carbon technologies sector in the country is very disappointing despite the presence of empirical evidence of the problems caused by climate change in the short and long run.
While Zimbabwe’s emission levels are currently very insignificant on a world scale, the country has the potential to become an active polluter of measurable proportions in the future. Its future growth, where it is aiming a US$100 billion economy, is built around the exploitation of fossil fuel-related energies in agriculture, mining, transport and the manufacturing sectors among others.
In fact, there are fears worldwide that developing countries will emerge among the heaviest emitters by 2050, as a result of rapid industrialisation.
In such a scenario, Zimbabwe needs to take responsibility and ramp up its efforts to curb greenhouse gases in line with what science says is required to keep the world reasonably safe. The increased use of cleaner renewable energy sources may bridge that gap significantly.
Ambitious NEP renewables project
The NEP articulates a cocktail of measures it targets for implementation in the renewable energy sector by the end of this decade. The most promising of all is the development of hydropower, which aims to bring onto the national grid a total 1 266 megawatts.
Government targets to add 300MW to the Kariba South Extension by 2016 and commission a massive 800MW at the Batoka Gorge four years later, provided funding is secured. Other plans are to build hydro stations within inland dams and rivers at Pungwe providing a cumulative 24MW in two phases, Tokwe-Mukorsi 12MW, Gairezi 30MW and Kondo 100MW.
The projects are in no small way very ambitious given that the Government is cash strapped and the budget deficit is widening each passing month.
But if it can pull this off, the environment would be a lot happier, so as the entire economy along with its citizens who have endured long dark years.
Currently, Zimbabwe produces only 750MW from hydropower. Energy experts say the country has a gross theoretical hydro potential of 18 500 gigawatts (GW) per year and a technically feasible potential of 17 500GW per year. The policy will support the Forestry Commission to increase the tree planting rate to 20 million from 10 million by 2015, increase the efficiency of woodfuel use as well as collaborate with relevant ministries to enforce existing and proposed regulations against the destruction of natural forests.
Other key deliverables are aimed at biofuels, increasing their share in the liquid fuels mix by a minimum 20 percent ethanol blend in three years and 5 percent for biodiesel by 2020.
But before talking of lucrative biofuels plans, Government must show it is able to achieve similar future goals by first sorting out the problems at Chisumbanje. Political bickering has cost 4 500 employees their jobs at the ethanol plant in the southeastern Lowveld while Green Fuel, the owners of the project, are stuck with several million litres of the fuel.
To promote solar energy use, the NEP aims to establish a fund for the short to medium term to address the ongoing electricity crisis.
Pursuant to this, regulations will be implemented next year that force the installation of solar geysers into all new homes failing which penalties in the form of higher electricity tariffs are effected.
Solar use will also be promoted through the establishment of “cost-reflective feed-in tariffs with appropriate subsidy mechanisms and other incentives to promote grid and off-grid power generation using solar and other renewable energy resources”.
The use of biogas especially in rural schools, hospitals and other public institutions, as an alternative energy source for cooking and heating, should also be actively promoted.
Why renewable energy technologies?
Renewable energy sources are critical in many aspects. They are clean, efficient and less hazardous to human health and the natural environment. Renewables are cost effective, as supported by their ability to regenerate allowing for repeated use for many times. By clean, it simply means renewables are non-carbon-emitting energy sources. Carbon emissions are dangerous, and are widely blamed for causing climate change and global warming.
An International Energy Agency report in 2010 showed that emissions rose 5 percent that year and were up 49 percent since 1991.
Some 30 billion tonnes of the dirt were released into the atmosphere in 2010. If carbon emissions are not effectively controlled, scientists say the world would warm at a rate of up to 6 degrees Celsius by 2100.
All the suffering, deaths, famine, droughts, floods, heat waves and extreme cold that the world has experienced in recent decades are a result of warming of only less than one degree Celsius over the last century.
In Zimbabwe the market for renewable energies is still wide open especially in remote rural areas, which are not likely to be electrified in the short to medium term.
The urban market is also available as well as the small-scale farming community, which have both been severely affected by sharp power cuts.
As at 2005, figures from Zesa show that the electrification level stood at 15 percent for rural areas, 85 percent for urban areas and a national average of 42 percent.
This shows that more than three-quarters of the rural population and more than half of Zimbabwe’s people are without access to electricity, which makes the renewables energy case urgent.
God is faithful.