UPGRADE OF INDEPENDENT POWER PRODUCERS WOULD SAVE US FOUR STAGES OF LOAD SHEDDING

Response to Let there be light,

11 March

Take the E out of DMRE and put shareholding and governance of Eskom under the Treasury, and then we can have a minister of energy (as we always had). Since we have a constrained transmission grid but have a host of independent power providers with existing transmission interface, immediately go out to them for upgrades.

A 100MW solar plant produces about 500MWh, ranging from 0 to 100MW over the day. It could add 200MW and storage and use its existing transmission interface for 1,500MWh a day with storage.

It would be a 5am to 9pm dispatchable energy source and, going by the Scatec project, probably around R1.30/ kWh (a sixth of what diesel or gas costs) because no new transmission gear would be needed.

It could be up in 20 months and would take out four stages of load shedding. Please ask the new electricity minister why not? Johan Buys

The new electricity minister has impressive doctorates but nothing in electrical! So we hope by some miracle he solves load shedding. What about the loss of jobs and loss of just about everything? The problem is mammoth and unrecoverable. So sad, yet the masses will vote again for the party that has destroyed South Africa.

Rory Macnamar

Wrong person for a job that should not have existed in the first place. It is only a matter of time before we hear of conspiracies by the press to make him fail.

John Millar

So by all accounts a disaster of a mayor during his tenure, with dodgy deals following him like sharks at a sardine run. He then moved on to be the presidential infrastructure czar, compiling lists of “shovel-ready” projects to the tune of hundreds of billions, trotted out by the President every year as the engine to kick-start our economy. Trouble is, these are not new projects, but a compilation of projects that have been in the pipeline for years and don’t amount to anything more than routine infrastructure delivery – and yet not one has been delivered so far. Not one. Dee Bee