26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

It is widely acknowledged that the current patterns of energy supply and consumption are not sustainable (COP21). As a result, the global community has adopted an ambitious programme, known as the Two Degrees Scenario (2DS), to decarbonise energy supply and reduce substantially its dependence on fossil fuels. This programme has many social and technological challenges. For instance, although renewable energy (RE) technologies such as wind and solar are competitive against gas, coal and nuclear, the intermittent nature of RE presents major difficulties with respect to load balancing and supply security. This challenge has led to the emergence of the energy storage systems and smart grid technologies, including hydrogen storage and the dynamic management of energy supply in response to rapid changes in solar or wind energy. The integration of various technologies through smart grid approaches is fundamentally an application of digitisation. Such techniques are still under development, however, and have not been widely implemented. Moreover the new technologies are being developed within a context of rigid techno-economic systems which have little interest in facilitating sustainability transitions. In this paper, the development of hydrogen fuel cells in South Africa is reviewed as a case study in order to understand how countries can act to support new technological innovation systems (TIS) that will be essential to meet the goals of 2DS. The hydrogen programme in South Africa, referred to as HySA, is mostly a research initiative driven by the Department of Science and Technology with some support from the private sector. All of the HySA research centres and many of the relevant role players have been interviewed in order to profile HySA’s activities within a TIS framework. The work shows that the hydrogen TIS in South Africa is still at a pre-competitive level. It is important that the principles of niche experimentation, a proven strategy in respect of proven sustainability transitions, are further pursued if the country is to make a meaningful contribution to hydrogen generation/storage and its integration with fuel cells. Importantly, the costs of energy derived from RE via electrolysis, storage and generation, which are presently several times larger than the use of natural gas, must be reduced. Furthermore the country needs to focus more heavily on the development of digital technologies to manage supply fluctuations. The article concludes with a set of clear steps which will need to be taken in order to allow the future development of a viable zero emissions energy sector based on the integration of the hydrogen and the electron economies.