Sustaining Cape Town - imagining a liveable city

The book in which I contributed a chapter has been published! “Sustaining Cape Town - imagining a liveable city” - I was quite delighted to see it for the first time in hard print yesterday.

The book grew out of some work done for the City of Cape Town on imagining what an alternative future for the City of Cape Town might look like, and how to achieve it. I was privileged enough to be able to do the work on Energy, and thus propose an alternative energy approach and solution for Cape Town and the Western Cape.

The book is printed by Sun Press, edited by Mark Swilling, ISBN 978-1-920338-30-5. It will shortly be available from www.sun-e-shop.co.za

Frank

SA Peak Coal

Here is a thought not taken into the IRP2 planning process: What if Peak Coal were hit to South Africa in 2020? Similar to peak oil, the argument is that a few years after discoveries have peaked, production will peak too, and this is independent of an increasing resource price. But the SA context is a little different, with the current reserves having just been DOWNSIZED from 50 gigatonnes to 15 gigatonnes!

This is detailed in a report from the consultancy Umvoto, a summary of which can be found here.

So it seems that there may be a new pressure coming to move away from coal: price.

Frank