Greyton unreliable electricity. 2012-08-25

From one of my friends who lives in Greyton: 4 or 5 electricity outages this month, sometimes for two days at a stretch.............

I recommended:

Please ask everyone you know to Like NetMeteringSA. When we get to 50,000 likes we will change South Africa. We can already make our own electricity cheaper than we can buy it. And we can make it reliably and 24 hours a day. People think that renewable energy is only available during sun hours, but there are lots of different renewable energies:

• Solar (from the Sun), eg for Heating and Cooling using Solar Water Heater and Solar Air Heaters; Photovoltaic for electricity; Concentrated Solar Power Trough (CSP); Concentrated Solar Tower (CST)
• Wind, eg Wind Turbines on Land and on Sea
• Water: eg River, eg Micro-Hydro and Large Hydro-Electric
• Water: eg Ocean Currents (flow 24 hours a day; equal to a constant 80 km per hour wind)
• Water: e.g. Tidal Power, Wave Power
• Geothermal
• Biogas: eg from Sewerage, Municipal Solid Waste (the black bins you throw away), Food Waste, and from waste products from farming
• Storage, eg Battery, Pumped Storage using large dams, CSP with Storage and CST with Storage, Ultra-capacitors, etc.
• Regarding Battery: note how the battery in your cell phone has reduced in size over the last 20 years and increased in capability at the same time. This revolution is happening in the large battery industry as well.

So I have listed over 20 ways of using renewable energy. Contrast that with fossilised fuel energy:

• Coal
• Nuclear
• Gas
• Oil

And since 1991, the cost of buying electricity using fossilised fuels has increased from 10c per kWh to R1.47 per kWh in the City of Cape Town, whilst the cost of making electricity using Photovoltaic technology has reduced from R11.50 per kWh to R1.36 per kWh. Prices include VAT. We need to thank Germany for noticing that fossil fuel costs would dramatically increase from 1991 to 2012 and that they needed to incentivise industry to reduce renewable energy costs. Germany introduced the "Feed In Tariff" which helped this revolution to happen. Note that there are also immense subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and even to the car industry, so governments incentivising industries is not new.

Back to Greyton: I would write to Eskom and your municipality and say that you pay them for reliable electricity. If they can't provide this, then it should be an automatic indication that you can install your own Grid Tie System with battery backup. See what they say :)