It’s time to stop whining when the lights go out. With a bit of ingenuity and a moderate investment in alternative forms of energy, you too can take the first steps towards living happily off the grid. Take that, Eskom! By Adam Oxford
Like most people living in South Africa, I’m fairly unimpressed with the way things are when it comes to electricity supply at the moment. And I’m not entirely convinced by the plans and the timescales to improve things either.
But I do believe these hours of darkness are a great opportunity for householders to contemplate the future and think about how to reduce their reliance on grid-based electricity, cut their monthly bill and bring down their carbon footprint at the same time.
Somewhat grandiosely, I also believe it’s an opportunity for South Africa to leapfrog an entire stage of developmental infrastructure and embrace what I believe is a very positive future for all humanity.
In much the same way as mobile phones let us skip the need for universal landlines, we’re at the stage when renewables like wind and solar are mature enough for decentralised power distribution too.
In more ways than one, we can take back power. How’s that for making the most of a bad situation? And what does all that mean?
I think technology is heading to the point where big, expensive to maintain, national networks of mains electricity with their expensive, smoke-belching power stations and humming substations will be things kids read about in history books. Like horse-drawn chariots and the steam engine, their time is nigh.
We’re fast approaching the point where it’s more cost effective for small scale, independent power production at the level of the house, street or factory. Wind turbines are already among the cheapest ways of generating power, and solar is falling fast.
If it hadn’t been for load-shedding, I’m not sure I’d have realised how close we are, so thanks, Eskom.
I have a lot of very clever friends who like to get their hands dirty with electronics and heavy machinery. When they see a problem – like load-shedding – they don’t wait for a government bailout or a mythical new nuclear power station, they go ahead and start to sort things out for themselves. Playing around with your own, local solution and not waiting for someone else to fix things is a lot of fun.
Some of them have been living completely off the grid for many years, with their personal solar arrays and outhouses full of battery back-ups. But they’re the wealthy ones who can afford to spend a couple of hundred thousand Rand in one go to guarantee themselves free and reliable electricity for the foreseeable future.
Sadly not everyone can do that yet, although I remain convinced that the first bank which can put together a special rate loan package for a solar installation that costs less per month than you currently pay Eskom will clean up.
For less than R1, 500, using a modern solar panel of the kind designed for camping, you can build yourself a small generator with enough battery backup to run your laptop, WiFi router, even a TV. All you need is a bit of imagination and the most rudimentary of skills to cable it up.
The electronics to build such a system are cheap and easily available. And once you start doing stuff like that, the punk rock, DIY, ‘maker’ mindset that it inspires is infectious. Take a look at this story, about a guy who wanted to protect his router from power surges during lightning storms, so he started running it off of a solar panel and battery.
His next project is to convert all the lights in his home to 12V LED bulbs so they can be powered the same way. Bit by bit, a couple of thousand Rand at a time, he’s taking his entire home off grid in a solution entirely of his own devising.
The practicalities of building your own solar system are going to be lost on many people, it’s true. If you haven’t wielded a screwdriver in anger since high school woodworking classes, I have two things to say to you: firstly, you’re missing out and secondly, don’t worry. Small scale off-grid power is becoming a reality, and not just on a per-home basis.
Take the enterprising residents of Parkhurst in Joburg. They’ve just set an astounding precedent in community self-help, by digging up their own roads and laying fibre optic cable for high speed internet access, because they got tired of waiting for Telkom to sort them out. Their next move has been to put out a tender for a small local solar power station to take the entire suburb off-grid. That’s people power, right there.
*Adam Oxford is a specialist writer on technology issues. This is the first in a series of articles on how to take back the power in your home and life. Stay tuned to the Change Exchange for more!
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