Announcements made in the President’s State of the Nation Address suggest the government intends to announce in the Budget next week ways to assist the South African public and businesses to establish and utilise renewable energy . The move is intended to help SA develop better energy security and to lighten the load on Eskom. What we don’t know is how the system will work, or indeed what system the government has selected.
Anyway, just putting my cards on the table. I’m proud to say I’m pro-solar, but more concretely, I’m pro-solar by experience, and not simply by theory. So obviously, I’m delighted to hear that the government is finally going to step up to the plate and help South Africans do this. But how? But they do have one point: it’s complicated. And it’s complicated because to pay out correctly, you have to monitor usage very accurately. Furthermore, there is a grid-balancing issue because — and this you won’t believe — solar power does not work at night. Neither of these problems is unsolvable, and we know they are not unsolvable because almost the entirety of Europe solved them more than a decade ago.
Now, there is something about Germany that you need to know. The average sun-hours per day in Stuttgart, which is about a third of the way up from the southern border, is 3.33 hrs/day. In German terms, this is good. In Bremen, about two-thirds of the way up the country, the usable time for PV systems is on average about two hours per day. Compare and contrast South Africa, which has about six hours of PV usable solar per day, on average.