Is government an enabler? Is electricity an enabler or a cash cow? 2012-08-06

IMHO, South Africa's problems are twofold. 1) We don't have nearly enough electricity and our biggest export is jobs followed closely by mineral resources. 2) Our culture is slowly deteriorating into one where promises are not kept. My suppliers promise me something. I sell it. When I come and buy it I discover it isn't available or the price has doubled, or something else is wrong, like I have to wait 6 months for it! This used to only happen in Government, eg my wife applied for a birth certificate which took 9 months to get; and locally the City of Cape Town had our Erf number wrong so we were getting someone else's electricity account. This took us about 3 years to resolve. Overseas a friend got a birth certificate, ID and passport in 20 minutes and a one day wait.

Government's role used to be as an enabler to get the economy going. Providing the basic infrastructure, eg electricity, water, roads, communications, sewerage. Based on this businesses grew and paid tax. And their employees also paid tax. This tax paid for the army, housing, education, medicine, etc.

Today government treats the economy's enablers as cash cows and by doing so continues to rapidly export jobs to countries that have or are adding electricity, like China, which adds South Africa's entire capacity every 38 weeks, and which this year will add more Renewable Energy than South Africa's entire capacity.

But if government stopped its myopia and allowed our economy to grow fast, it would collect three times as much taxation as it collects today!! And this is if it grew as fast as China, or Australia, or Ghana, or Mexico, or many other countries. We are the 37th fastest growing economy in Africa!! We can do something about it. It starts with electricity, which is one of the three main enablers for a modern economy. We have the other two: labour and resources.

Warning to new market entrants. Are Eskom and the City of Cape Town Serious about Renewable Energy? 2012-02-22

In reply to a friend's comments that Eskom are doing what they can!

Some of the problems they are creating are:

1) They are saying one thing to the public publicly and then doing something else entirely. This is called Greenwashing and IMHO it is the most heinous crime of all. It is doing thousands of innocent people and companies out of millions of Rands of money and thousands of hours of time.

2) They have created the most difficult and stringest laws in the world in order to get their "rebates." This is designed so that the common citizen thinks all is ok, when actually the system is falling apart. As you can see this has a lot to do with 1). For example to be an "Embedded Generator" you need to follow 15 separate laws and 10 additional rules; plus you need to submit 8 documents if you are under 100 KW and 10 documents if you are over 100 KW. In the USA there are two laws to follow, a PV one (the NEC Article 690) and the Building Codes (OHS in South Africa), and there are 3 standards that need to be followed regarding modules, inverters, and other electrical equipment and how it connects to the grid, ie IEEE 1547, UL 1741 and UL 1703; and one has to submit one document! If South Africa was really serious about renewable energy and solving its electricity crisis, it would simply adopt the USA code or one of the European codes, which are designed to work, not to prevent competition with the state owned monopoly. In my opinion, this is anti-competitive behaviour and if Eskom was a private company it would be illegal.

3) We have less than half of the required capacity to run this country and are exporting jobs and the possibility of converting our raw materials into products at an alarming rate. The only way this can be solved is by allowing the grid to be accessed by private people and allowing competition in the electricity marketplace.

4) Government treats electricity as a cash cow, whereas it is an enabler to get the economy going. If this was allowed to happen, government would collect much more taxation from corporates and people than it does now which would pay for its policies.

Wildpoldsreid. Some cities in Germany already energy self sufficient. 2012-06-21

In Germany, most of the renewable energy capacity is owned by individuals or community power projects. In this grassroots energy revolution, millions of households, villages, and even entire regions have already declared their partial or total energy independence by becoming independent power producers. This is driven by the concept of energy autonomy, of not being dependent on multinational corporations or energy sources that destroy the world that future generations have to live in. It was made possible by policy frameworks that enabled and encouraged people to invest in renewable energy sources and enforced market access by removing obstacles that prevent renewable energy projects around the world to this very day.

This video tries to show how this bottom-up push toward a 100% renewable energy system looks. Enjoy the video!

Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1iwB9)

http://youtu.be/qkYv3xQ2W3I

Mad Activists. 2012-07-19

To all my activist colleagues:

I humbly suggested that we activists are the stupidest people on the planet. Although we have the planet's well being at heart, we spend our hard one earnings and savings trying to help and most people just don't care, are myopic, are disinterested, apathetic, or worst of all, are simply in such a fossilised fuel mythology induced daze that they are simply dead people walking.

We put huge efforts into commenting on new laws; into commenting on newspaper articles; into being on the radio; into going to conferences free of charge; into giving; but what do we get out? And how much financial debt is worth all this exposure? And why do we allow ourselves to be used?

The government spends Billions on Consultants and then asks us activists to use our extensive knowledge to comment on what the consultants have said and written. We must be completely mad to do this for free. We are essentially doing the consultants work and filling in the blanks. Helping and giving without any sort of financial compensation. Yes, we feel good. We feel like we are helping. But we are putting a strain on our work and our families.

I believe now that we need to get together us activists, eg Muna, Marina, Jonathan, Mariette, Antony, myself, Ninette, and many others, and put ourselves into a team of people who trust each other and then offer our environmental services to people who wish to pay for these services.

So far I have spent R4 million of time and money on this venture over the past 5 years. I've had a lot of fun, spoken at many conferences in Cape Town, Joburg and Durban, including in parliament, and met political leaders and mayors. But I haven't made any new friends, amazingly. And getting to meet business leaders is proving impossible. I know not why, except I have a hunch that they want to be charged and we don't charge anything.

I look forward to working with you all on solving our planet's problems and at the same time earning enough to put food on the table without having to get further and further into debt.

Love and respect,
David.

Eskom and the City of Cape Town are preventing economic growth. 2012-07-16

Eskom and the Cities have asked people to reduce their electricity consumption. One way of doing this is by allowing private people to produce their own electricity and also by incentivising us to move our consumption outside peak time.

These incentives are available to big business, but not to private people.

Eskom and the Cities are still preventing people from producing their own electricity and feeding the grid. Eskom and the Cities are so fixated on earning revenue from electricity sales that they have forgotten that electricity is an enabler that gets the economy going.

Allowing private people and SMME's to remove themselves from the grid by implementing the Embedded Generation standard which allows for Time of Use Tariffs for small consumers would not only mean that private Embedded Generators would produce their own energy, but they would also put systems in place so that they use minimal energy at peak times.

Implementation of massive electricity cost savings. 2012-06-24

Save 35% of your electricity bill just by working together with others. Before you even install Photovoltaic or Solar Water Heating Systems.

All you need to do is:

Phase1: Buy In

1) Change the way you and your colleagues/members think. The most difficult part of this process. The rest is relatively simple, but I find this first step to be the most difficult.

Phase 2: Metering

2) Install special meters in each unit so that you can track their usage at least every 1 minute, with automatic uploads to your server;

3) Install a server in your Body Corporate which records their people's usage. The server could be put in the "cloud" which will make it more secure;

4) Ask the members not to change their behaviour during the first 3 months after installing the special meters. The members can view their electricity usage either online on the web or on their smart-phones, just to ensure that the meters are working;

5) Negotiate with the members to pay the Body Corporate instead of the Utility (or City);

6) Negotiate TIme of Use and better Tariffs with the Utility as now you are a big user;

7) Wait 3 months and then ask people to reduce their consumption and move from peak to off-peak. Note that you will use the 3 months history that you have plus the people's last year's monthly history to calculate their electricity usage for the other 9 months of the year;

8) Give rebates to your members and at the same time start building up a fund for future Repairs and Maintenance. This fund could actually be used in the future to pay for Photovoltaic Systems so that you can make your own electricity;

Phase 3: Energy Efficiency

9) All the above is Phase 1. Once you have done this you start Phase 2, which involves more dramatic Energy Efficiency interventions reducing your electricity demand even more;

Phase 4: Producing your own Electricity

10) And then once this is done you start Phase 3. Where you install Photovoltaic and other systems to produce your own electricity, but where you still buy off peak electricity from the Utility, usually between 10pm and 6am.

What do you think? Do you have any questions? How can I be of assistance?

SAAEA Gold Membership and Green Merlin Award to David Lipschitz and My Power Station Technology. 2012-06-16