It’s a fact that the South African power supply system is different in many ways from power supply systems in other parts of Africa and (for all I know) from other systems throughout the world – but let’s stick to Africa for the meanwhile.

South Africa has the biggest supply system of all the countries in Africa. This should not be, because there are several countries in Africa which are bigger than South Africa by some degree, for example Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo are about twice as big. However, South Africa is larger, based on electrical power consumption. The reason for this is the influence of the various mines and other large industries in South Africa.

The South African power system developed in a very strange way and, to this day, it exists in a very strange way. All other electrical power systems in Africa are either rigidly privatised or fully government owned. The privately owned systems supply power or disconnect power in a very rigid fashion; there are no half measures. If you don’t pay, you don’t get supplies. The government-owned systems are more or less priced at giveaway prices. This only applies to consumers and persons who need to use power in a general way. The moment there is a consumer who is making a hard living, which requires electricity, the rules change completely, and electrical supply is rigidly controlled. This sort of control of electrical power supply costs leads to some places which have no electricity and other places which only have electricity at high costs (or very low costs in the case of government-subsidised systems).

South Africa developed a system which very much favoured large consumers, such as mines and other industries. This system supplied power to various South African consumers at a very low rate. This was beneficial for everybody, and the result was a South African power system which was very successful at selling a large amount of power, but at a very low rate.

However, there was a problem. The difficulty was this – it was difficult to put the prices up.

While electricity prices were kept artificially low, owing to historical policy regulations, the prices of other commodities went up. So, when electricity needed to be priced more realistically, it was impossible to raise the price enough for the power supplier to catch up. The policy of keeping electrical prices low for historical reasons resulted in a severe imbalance between the cost of producing electricity and what it was being sold for.

We are now faced with a situation whereby large numbers of people believe the electrical costs are too high. In the past, there was no point in bypassing the power system and using electricity without paying for it. It just wasn’t worth it. Today, however, believing that the costs are too high, a substantial amount of electricity is being used illegally or without cost at all.

One can either introduce a system of rigid control of electrical consumption or reduce electricity production costs. A reduction in production costs is not likely to occur; thus, illegal use of electricity will either have to be rigorously controlled or some other alternative will need to be found.

One way would be to supply electricity to homes in a form that is impossible to use illegally. This would involve assigning an ‘address’ to each electrical package sent that would make it only able to be used at a single point. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense to you; the idea is to have electricity sales regulated such that electricity can only be sold to specific addresses belonging to specific users.

One of the great advantages of this idea is that it becomes immediately more complicated than existing systems, yet quite easy to implement. There will naturally be (as there are with computers) systems which bypass security protocols, but nowhere near the scale we have at present.

Will we live to see this being implemented? I’m not sure, but just remember that you read it here first!