(2001) South Africa

Recommendations to SEW

• Access to affordable energy
• Indicator 4: Clean Energy Investment
• Indicator 5 - resilience and trade
• Indicator 6 - burden of public investment in energy
• Indicator 7

1. Access to affordable energy

While indicator 3, access to electricity, is one important indicator of the social equity side of energy systems - and a relatively easy one to measure - it does not really tell us whether people can afford the energy to which they have access. Research in South Africa suggests that many electrified households still do not use electricity - and may even use traditional, highly polluting fuels - because they can not afford to pay for the electricity (Mehlwana 1998; Thom 2000). There are also a variety of social and cultural reasons why people may still choose to use non-electric fuels (Mehlwana 1999c). Of course, simply tracking the price of energy is not the answer, because we are concerned about services (eg home heating, cooking, hot water) rather than energy use and prices, per se. Perhaps an additional measure could be 'the cost of cooking a meal for the poor', which would reflect not just energy costs but the efficiency of the appliances and fuels available to households. We recognise that the data for this will be hard to find for many countries, but there is a substantial information on cooking stove efficiency and often data on the share of households that use particular appliances. It might be possible to make some estimates at least that would provide a valuable social metric.

2. Indicator 4: Clean Energy Investment

As mentioned in the text, having to compare clean energy investment to the total requires significant additional research and analysis. Maybe it would be just as effective to compare clean energy investment to energy sector GDP. Of course, the sustainability goal would not be 100%, because annual investment will only be a fraction of energy sector GDP. Additional analysis would be needed to define a sustainability target, but it would be easier to use GDP and annual investment.

3. Indicator 5 - resilience and trade

The conclusion for South Africa discusses why a relatively low value on this vector is not necessarily good news. It may be necessary to scale this vector so that even 10% of total exports to non-renewable energy is still relatively close to one. This could be done with a logarithmic scale. More county reports should be analysed to see whether this would be feasible.

4. Indicator 6 - burden of public investment in energy

As mentioned above, it is not clear whether this indicator is measuring investment or expenditure. If it measures investment and compares this to GDP, then the value for 1 should not be 100% since this is comparing 'apples and oranges'. If it measures expenditure, then there a major questions with how to deal with expenditure that is offset by income (eg in parastatal enterprises). This is explained under the discussion of indicator 6 in this report.

5. Indicator 7

There has been some discussion in the past about whether this indicator should be energy productivity (GDP/energy) or energy intensity (energy/GDP). While energy productivity is a more positive concept, to convert the information to a vector with 0 being the best, we would still have to use the inverse of productivity.