Like children of an emaciated mother whose breasts have dried up, the Association of Comms and Telecoms (ACT) of South Africa have recently come together crying for milk. This goes to show the crisis has become an impending catastrophe. Telecommunication companies have installed solar panels and batteries but, like the stretched-out breasts, cannot produce milk no matter how much the child cries. Significant evidence should be sought from Germany, and the cries by ACT just confirm that the Just Energy Transition (JET) is just a lemon and not an orange. Yet there are promises of about 9,000 megawatts of installable renewables. Take it from Germany, which has gone for real power from coal and heeded electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s cry that only coal or nuclear provide baseload required for a secure grid. Minister of forestry and fisheries Barbra Creecy in her budget speech hopes for milk when her more-than-affording data centre have confirmed that solar’s breasts have actually dried up. Go to any shopping mall and you’ll see many heeded the call with football pitch-sized installations. Yet when Eskom goes in its astronomic load-shedding level ntoni-ntoni, these shopping malls fold into darkness...