Professor Powers in South Africa - interviewed by SA Broadcasting Corp.
Professor Melissa Powers, who is on sabbatical in Denmark and Spain this year, recently visited South Africa and was interviewed by Nina Oosthuizen for a story on fracking and renewable energy for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Professor Powers is the Director of the Green Energy Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School.
Here is part of Professor Powers’ observations regarding the potential for renewables in South Africa:
“You have so much sun, you have so much of a great solar potential here. The solar resource is something that you could distribute to smaller communities and get developed actually relatively quickly in a way that investing in large power plants especially nuclear power plants, it takes a number of years to build a safe reliable nuclear plant where as solar you could distribute quickly if not now. The other reason is that imagine for example the degree to which South Africa could not only expand its electricity capacity but also its manufacturing capacity if it really made a commitment to not only use renewables but to produce them here and then also think about exporting those as a commodity.”
