Farming out power in the olden days: IPPs in KZN
THE inconvenience of load shedding makes a Midlands retiree remember not just how much more convenient life was with continuous power, but also how one didn’t always need to rely on Eskom for it.
Independent on Saturday reader Ken Buchanan-Clarke grew up on his parents’ dairy farm, Rambleholm, the best part of which – the vleis – are now under Albert Falls Dam. Before the property was expropriated and they had to move out, the falls were a renewable source of electricity.
“We ran a dairy farm near Cramond and drew power from the then Albert Falls Power Company owned by a Mr John Harries. He supplied electricity to the village of Cramond and all the farmers in the uMngeni valley that is now under water,” he said.
The farm used electricity from Harries to cool fresh milk before Buchanan-Clarke and farmworkers did the morning rounds in a bakkie, delivering it door-to-door.
“We were called Buttercup Dairies. Lots of people remember us driving the streets of Pietermaritzburg in a bakkie with a green canopy and a model of a buttercup on it. It was a wonderful life,” he said.
Buchanan-Clarke recalled twin wires running across the uMngeni River, which went over the falls and now feeds Albert Falls Dam, supplying his family’s farm and neighbouring farms with electricity from Albert Falls Power Company.
“Sometimes a bird would fly into the wires – a big bird like a stork – and cause a short circuit.
“Dad would have to go across the river in a flat-bottomed boat, climb up, and using a pole with a marble head, would separate the wires and get the power to flow again,” he said.
The private power utility also fed the village of Cramond, where Buchanan-Clarke started school.
“There, I learned to count on an abacus and we wrote with chalk on slates. But we always had power, and it cost us nothing. Load shedding and blackouts were unheard of,” he said.
He feels that surely today, with the engineering expertise available in South Africa, tremendous power could be harnessed from two high waterfalls in the Midlands that were not under dams – the Howick Falls and Karkloof Falls.
“Albert Falls was a tiny waterfall. Just 30 or 40 metres high going over two or three cascades. They would have diverted it out of the river and put it through a turbine,” he said.