Cooling towers and smokestacks still loom over the single-storey houses of Komati, but the winter sky is clear: smoke hasn’t billowed from the vast concrete chimneys of the South African town’s power station since it stopped burning coal in 2022, 61 years after its inauguration.
While the state power company Eskom didn’t fire any permanent employees, the end of coal generation and earlier job losses in nearby mines have fuelled doubts in the small town and wider coal belt that there are any benefits to South Africa’s “just energy transition” to renewable power.
Opposite Komati’s supermarket on a Thursday afternoon, unemployed people of all ages sat by the roadside. “We are just sitting here, waiting for anything, maybe a company car that will come by and say they are looking for people,” said Busisiwe Ndebele, who was a mine plant attendant for five years until she was fired while pregnant in 2022.
The 34-year-old said she had received training from Eskom in CV-writing and running a business, but didn’t see a future beyond coal. “We are surrounded by coalmines, so if the coalmines close down there won’t be any jobs,” she said.
The phrase “just transition” is thought to have been coined in the US in the early 1990s by the trade unionist Tony Mazzocchi, who wanted a fund to help workers move away from jobs in which they were exposed to toxic chemicals.
In recent years, it has come to represent decarbonising economies without destroying livelihoods that depend on fossil fuels. The phrase appeared in the 2015 Paris agreement, which legally bound countries to limit global heating to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels”.
South Africa was the world’s 15th highest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2023, according to the World Bank. Coal power accounted for 82% of electricity generation last year, according to the energy thinktank Ember, down from 90% in 2014.
Over the same period, wind and solar power expanded from 0.4% each to 4.5% and 8% respectively, after 2021 government reforms enabled more private sector generation. Only two of South Africa’s 14 operating coal power stations are scheduled to still be running fully by 2050, as it aims to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
At the Cop26 climate conference in 2021, countries including the UK, France and Germany pledged $8.5bn (£6.5bn), mostly in loans, to support South Africa’s plans for a just transition away from coal. In 2022, South Africa said it needed 1.5tn rand (£62bn) by 2027 in international and local private investments to meet its greenhouse gas cutting targets while protecting jobs. International pledges have since risen to $12.9bn as other lenders joined, while the US dropped out.
However, the transition has hit multiple roadblocks.
One has been the prospect of job losses in a country where unemployment has risen from 36% to 43% since 2015. Approximately 400,000 jobs, 80,000 in coal mining, are at risk in Mpumalanga province, the site of most of the power stations and mines, a 2023 government report estimated.
South Africa also needs new transmission infrastructure to bring large private renewable energy projects in the windy south-west and sunny north-west on to the grid. Eskom, which has struggled financially in recent years, said last year it planned to build 9,000 miles (14,500km) of new transmission lines in the next decade – a fivefold increase on the previous decade.
Meanwhile, crippling power cuts of up to 12 hours a day in recent years led to the closure of three coal power stations being pushed back from 2027 to 2030. Policymakers said that on the plus side the delay would allow more time to implement lessons learned from Komati.
“You must front-load the benefits … and not shut down [power stations] and do it after, almost like an afterthought,” said the electricity and energy minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.
There are no illusions about how hard a transition that preserves economic activity will be.
Joanne Yawitch, who leads the just energy transition unit in South Africa’s presidency, said: “These coal transitions are difficult right around the world and they take decades to achieve. And, in many parts of particularly the developed world, what it’s taken is throwing a lot of money at them in order for them to work.”
In Komati’s case, a $497m project, financed by a $439.5m World Bank loan, a $47.5m concessional loan from the Canadian Clean Energy and Forest Climate Facility and a $10m grant from the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program – separate from the Cop26 pledges – didn’t start being disbursed until July 2023.
Only next year will a 72MW solar power plant and 150MW of battery storage start being built. An estimated 2,500 workers, 70% of them local, will be needed for their three-year construction, said the Komati manager, Thevan Pillay.
Inside the power station, Pillay was upbeat, showing off a demonstration site where staff were trying to grow vegetables under raised solar panels, and amid welding and solar panel installation training facilities. It employs 188 full-time staff, 22 of whom have been hired since the 2022 shutdown, while 170 staff have been “redeployed”. There are 250 contractors, down from a peak of 540.
Tshepang Matela was among 183 local people hired for six months to get rid of invasive plant species. Now, the 23-year-old high school graduate is a data analysis intern and wants to work in AI. She said: “I think a lot of the [Komati] citizens are starting to warm up to the idea of the just energy transition.”
The mood was colder across the river where residents of the Big House, an informal shack community, wash their clothes and a makeshift bridge that children cross to get to school is often swept away when it rains.
“When the power station closed, I felt so disappointed. There are too many people who lost their work,” said Maria Masango, who works with coal trucks.
Poppy Phindile, a real-estate agent and local politician with the African National Congress, the largest party in South Africa’s coalition government, wanted a medical clinic and high school for the town, which has an adult population of about 4,600 people, and for Eskom to build a bridge to the Big House (Eskom said it was the local government’s responsibility).
She also missed the coal dust: “We were able to live better lives, because we had money. Now there’s no dust, there’s no food.”
