Billionaire Says South African Grid Too Weak for Green Energy
- Cheaper to fix coal plants than build renewables: Melnichenko
- South Africa has had more than 200 days of power cuts in 2022
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South Africa needs to upgrade its coal-fired power plants rather than focus on renewable energy, according to a sanctioned Russian billionaire who made his fortune in part from generating electricity using the fuel.
“The priority for the country should be first to fix and modernize the existing fleet of power plants because that’s fast, that’s cheap and it allows at the same time to have a reasonable price of electricity,” Andrey Melnichenko said in an interview last week at a lodge in Irene, north of Johannesburg.