Hospital trauma units can expect to be busier in coming years as the solar-power revolution starts shining in SA and every Tom, Dick and Bulelani scales the rooftops in search of that magical angle of sun to light up their lives. Just as in the early days of TV in SA, when the men of the household proved their worth at last, clambering up dangerous corrugated iron or tiles, directed by confusing shouts from the living room below in the quest for the perfect test pattern, so too will many broken limbs need setting as DIY solar-panel tweaking becomes a weekend pastime. Who said solar is entirely safe?
There was a lot of mean-spirited commentary when we heard energy minister Gwede Mantashe might be getting his own Eskom. But now, yes you can look under your seat, we’re all getting our own Eskom, in the form of a licence from President Cyril Ramaphosa to generate as much electricity as we like in our own homes. And we can sell it back to Eskom if we don’t need it, so it’s goodbye Eskom and hello sunny days. Or so we hope.
Ramaphosa’s electricity address was a defining moment in his presidency in that he casually crossed several Rubicons, the most important of which was a rare affirmation of the national interest over party and related interests that have too frequently hobbled his reform efforts. He cut almost no slack to that tendency in the ANC, occupied in the main, but not solely, by radical economic transformation elements that see a more assertive role for the state and a lesser role for business, and hesitate to accept the days of coal are over. The trade unions that putatively support the party were ignored.
His embrace of a renewable energy future was unequivocal, sending a message to the coal interests entwined with political factions and players. That he was able to do so, and one shouldn’t assume he will necessarily get it all his own way when the details are wrangled over, demonstrates his view of the weakness of the voices against him.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that a few weeks of stage 4 and 6 load-shedding have softenedeven the ANC, whose leaders are quite happy to embrace the anathema of private-power generation, dressed up as giving Eskom space to repair its broken power stations. It was left to the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee’s Trevor Ngwane to point out that the only time Ramaphosa acknowledged the poor in his address to the nation was when he referred to illegal electricity connections.
Ngwane might be exaggerating, but he was backed indirectly by National Union of Mineworkers energy sector co-ordinator Khangela Baloyi, who said the Ramaphosa plan amounted to privatisation of our electricity generation. The same would become of Eskom as had happened to SAA and Denel. And he had a point.
You wonder whether we are headed for a new version of electricity apartheid, in which the middle classes make the taxpayer-assisted transition to renewables, possibly selling energy back into the grid to offset the cost, and the poor in the townships have to make do with an increasingly unreliable and underfunded Eskom, owned and operated by the state. Is this politically sustainable? Is there an option? Surely this will more deeply embed inequality and give a tangible quality to the hopelessness felt by those left behind by the middle-class train?
But it’s a train that’s left the station and as much as one feels sympathy for NUM’s viewpoint -- and Baloyi seemed sincere in his belief that Eskom plants could be fixed if they had the resources -- the fact is, banks won’t touch new coal projects. The industry is doomed, as it has been around the world.
If you’re going the DIY route on this, please remember, electricity is devilishly dangerous stuff and ideally the closest you should get to it is switching it on and off. But men often know better, and like to imagine a working knowledge of electricity is a masculine attribute. Ignorance is too.
Personally, as someone who often drives past an Eskom station, I can see nothing obviously wrong with it, and one can understand the temptation to burn as much coal as we’d like, have the best coal-burning power stations in the world and tell the rest of the world to take a flying leap at itself. But we’re not North Korea and that’s not going to happen. So panel up to the new future if you can afford it and hope for the sunshine as the ideological clouds are cleared by the howling wind of necessity.
And what’s not to look forward to on the new geopolitical energy horizon? Russia will control the oil and gas price, and China will determine the price of solar panels. The USA? It will have to be content with exporting Netflix.
If you’re going the DIY route on this, please remember, electricity is devilishly dangerous stuff and ideally the closest you should get to it is switching it on and off. But men often know better and like to imagine a working knowledge of electricity is a masculine attribute. Ignorance is too.
We have 220V alternating current (AC) in SA, which means it alternates between being on and off, depending on load-shedding or whether you’ve actually switched it off properly. It’s 50 Hertz, which means it’s very painful too. As an aside, it’s AC because the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla prevailed in the “battle of the currents’’ with the inventor of direct current Thomas Edison, who tested his new magic on animals. Thus convinced of its lethal qualities, Edison conspired with Westinghouse to use its AC gear to try to discredit Tesla by pioneering human electrocution, in this case of a man who had beaten a neighbour to death, for good reason I’m sure.
Edison even involved himself in electrocuting a rogue zoo elephant, Topsy, on January 4 1903, according to Wikipedia. The poor creature was fed carrots laced with 400g of potassium cyanide, electrocuted and strangled, the electrocution being the final cause of death.
In ways less cruel, we have similarly witnessed the slaying of the elephant in the room that was the near-ban on private power production and having the state as a monopoly supplier. The power is in our hands: we’re all Eskom now.
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