‘Your Piece of the Sun’ is a documentary which addresses the challenges of energy, gender and poverty in urban South Africa. It examines solutions and new approaches to energy service delivery. As evidenced globally, South Africa too is rapidly urbanizing with more and more people moving to cities in search
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Low carbon transition in South Africa: the governance and skills gap?
by Stephen Essex, Plymouth University South Africa’s energy system faces significant generation and distribution challenges over the next few decades. Electricity generation is based heavily on fossil fuels, especially cheap coal, and so contributes to greenhouse gases and climate change. Rolling blackouts are clear signs of the declining reliability of
Read moreLight services: energy poverty reconsidered
by Saska Petrova, University of Manchester. Much of the academic and policy debates on energy poverty – defined as a situation when a household lacks socially- and materially-necessitated levels of domestic ‘energy services’ (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015) – is focused on a rather limited set of residential energy end uses. In
Read moreGreen energy transitions in South Africa: on what terms?
by Deborah Potts, King’s College London. An energy transition in South Africa which achieves improvements related to environmental problems like climate change and does this at the same time as furthering the aims of social and economic justice – i.e. a ‘just transition’ – can probably safely be described as
Read moreWhy South Africa is finding it difficult to wean itself off coal
by Lucy Baker (University of Sussex) and and Jesse Burton (University of Cape Town). South Africa has made domestic and international commitments to climate change mitigation. But the country continues to depend on coal-fired power plants, which provide 92% of its electricity. A key challenge for the country in dealing with
Read moreGlobal energy services: towards a comprehensive understanding
by Stefan Bouzarovski, University of Manchester. With 2015 being declared the International Year of Light and the Obama administration recently announcing the ‘Clean Energy Savings for All Americans Initiative’, questions around energy poverty – the inability of households to secure socially- and materially-necessitated levels of energy services in the home
Read moreMunicipalities under pressure – Energy transitions, the apartheid legacy and South Africa’s fractured urban system
by Jiska de Groot, University of Cape Town. South Africa’s cities are faced with a central dilemma: how to address historical injustices and advance redress, whilst stimulating energy transitions and low carbon development? What does such a ‘just transition’ look like in a South African urban context? It will be
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