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Repair Your World: Solving the electricity crisis at no tax cost to the treasury

My latest letter to the Cape Times editor. Melanie Gosling's articles this week and NERSA today (24th February 2010) approving 25% increases (95% over 3 years) refer. My company has a number of clients who wish to provide their own energy. We don't believe that we can rely on Eskom energy. It isn't sustainable. It isn't clean. Not only is coal polluting the air, mining it is polluting our water resources and destroying our roads. If we weren't in a recession Eskom energy wouldn't be enough for our requirements, so there is no true security of supply, especially as Eskom has not got the increase they wanted. Lastly, in the medium to long term, Eskom's energy is not affordable for our clients and there are already affordable alternatives. However, most of the clients we consult to are too small to fit into the 1 Megawatt bracket which gets the feed in tariff (REFIT). And the REFIT itself is a farce because the government has implemented a tender system w...
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Preventing Load Shedding (Power Failures)

Dear all There are a few very simple ways of preventing load sheeting and potentially preventing the building of any more power stations in South Africa: 1) Switch off all appliances at the plug including computers, tv's, etc, when they are not being used. If it is inconvenient to get to the plug, use an extension cord from the wall and plug the plug in the wall into the extension cord. You can then unplug the plug at any time. 2) Don't run more than one of the following appliances at the same time: washing machine, dish washer, iron, lawnmower, kettle, microwave, kitchen mixer, oven/stove. 3) Switch off your playstation when it is not in use; same with your DSTV decoder. Both draw almost as much power when they are on standby as when they are on, so if you only watch 3 hours of TV a day, you are wasting electricity for the other 21 hours. 4) Try to use a laptop instead of a PC. Laptop's can save up to 95% of the electricity that PC's use. 5) If you use air-conditio...
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The Nuclear vs Renewables Debate in South Africa

I wrote this when I heard that the new South African Nuclear Power Station has been put on hold: (written 10/12/2008) The cost of the stopped nuclear power station was going to be R100 Billion (R100,000,000,000) and for this amount we could take more than 200,000 houses completely off the grid, paid for by the government and with minimal running costs and almost zero decommissioning costs. This at R500,000 per house (*1) The R100 Billion nuclear plant would have produced 3,400 MW. So the cost is R29 per watt. The biggest wind turbines are 6MW. This would need 567 wind turbines plus a factor of 20% for wind free days = 681 turbines. Large Wind Turbines cost in 2002 was R20 per watt (*6) which means that a 6MW turbine costs R120m Rand. Multiplied by 681 = R80,720,000,000 (R80 billion). Meaning we have money left over if compared with R100 for a Nuclear Power Station. This R19.3 Billion could possibly be used to add more wind turbines giving us a spare capacity of close to 50...
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