FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Message to Eskom: Screw You! (The sequel)

First published in Daily Maverick 168

We will get to the sentence, but first, here is the background. Years ago, I wrote a column for Daily Maverick in the early days of the site with the enormously provocative headline: “Message to Eskom: screw you”. (Great headline, the brainchild of DM Editor in Chief Branko Brkic.)

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-01-11-a-message-to-eskom-screw-you/

 

The story was about my own personal trials and triumphs living off the grid. In those days, it was something of a novelty, so it was interesting for readers as an experiment about what was then a new kind of lifestyle. 

The short version of the story is that my wife and I decided to move to a very remote place in the Karoo. It is so remote (we joke now that we have always been match-fit for Covid-19) that it did not have electricity nearby. We were faced with the tricky choice of bringing electricity in, which would have been a very expensive process. It’s about 5km to the nearest Eskom line. Farmers in the area do this, so it was conceivable, but the line has to be approved and it has to run fairly high off the ground, so that means a pile of poles and a whole construction process.

So for reasons that were neither necessarily environmentally conscious nor perspicacious, we decided to plunge into the wild world of solar power. We had some advantages, in that because we were in control of the house construction process, we could build in power-saving mechanisms. This is important because the less power you use, the less power you need to generate. The biggest issue was water heating because modern water geysers are massively power consumptive. So instead we use gas water heaters and gas cookers. This is important because it does mean transferring existing homes to solar power is often more complicated than simply putting in a few solar panels. 

The other complication has been storing power overnight. If I had a rand for every time a solar sceptic, of which there are gazillions, pointed out ever so patiently the astounding fact that solar power does not work at night, I would be a very rich person. Even then there were many options, but we opted for the most obvious: batteries. 

Most of our equipment came from a shop in Johannesburg that was run out of a house in suburbia; it was all such a novelty at the time. Now there are solar shops everywhere. After plugging some numbers into their system, our supplier decided we needed at least eight batteries and eight solar panels, and some assorted electrical equipment, and the total cost at the time was about R100,000. At the time, that seemed breathtaking, but since we had no real choice, we plonked our hard-earned moola on the table. 

Batteries are tricky. If you put too much demand on the batteries, they don’t last as long, so your usage and your system need to be matched. This is something Eskom knows everything about. Initially, I made the mistake of under-providing storage capacity, and our electricity demands were much higher than I thought. The result was disastrous, and our first set of batteries only lasted a few years. 

The result was more digging in the pocket, but once bitten, twice shy, and we forked out around R30,000 for the next batch. By this time, however, battery tech had improved, and instead of normal lead-acid batteries, we bought batteries specifically designed for static use; they were lower-voltage and physically much larger rather than the rejigged, deep-cycle car batteries we had bought previously. But they worked pretty well and lasted seven years, which is within the factory specs, if slightly at the lower end. 

But having been in the market, I am very aware of cost trends, and these trends are astounding. Every year, despite the decline of the rand, the price of solar panels has declined and their power increased. It is rather similar to the seemingly inexorable rise in computing power; it just seems like there is no end to the improvements. We spent about R6,000 per panel for a set of 120-watt panels. We added more later, as you can very easily.

The current price is around R2,000 for a 340-watt panel of around the same physical size. But the incredible thing is that those panels we bought in 2010 are still generating almost precisely the same amount of power as when they were first installed. And the power we generate is enough for a fleet of fridges and computers and hair dryers and all the mod cons.

There are big solar and wind projects being planned for SA, but somehow they never get going. Are they sufficient? I don’t think so. Surely this problem needs to be klapped on the head once and for all.