I don’t speak South African languages with any competence. Our President, apart from his pronunciation of the word ‘fellow’, has a good command of the English language and other South African languages.

When he addresses us on the occasional Thursday, he raises matters of Covid-19 and gender-based violence, but very seldom any more than that. We never hear about the corruption by politicians which, if you add it up, reaches a total of more than the yearly Budget of a small African country. We don’t hear much about Eskom. But we should be hearing about it. We should be hearing that the ruling party, in association with Hitachi, totally messed up the design of the boilers of the Medupi power station. We should be hearing that the national oil reserve in the State fuel farm has been stolen. We should be hearing that a hairdressing business had a contract to supply diesel fuel to the Ankerlig gas turbine station and most of the diesel was never delivered. We should be hearing that a lot of Eskom financial woes are not because Eskom is incompetent but because the ruling party appointed arrogant and incompetent management, who supervised a wide-scale theft of assets, for which Eskom now must pay. These things were left to fix themselves. Thank heavens for André de Ruyter.

But let me not spread doom and gloom. It could be worse, let’s face it. Anybody with the attention span of a kitten should notice that the days of load-shedding are drifting into past history. And this, Mr President, is not due to the diligence and management of the government of the country or of the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy.

But enough of this moaning. I am writing this to suggest how we can get a few thousand spare megawatts that we don’t have without building a new coal-fired station or erecting 209 wind turbines along the Garden Route (each being 134 m hub height and top of blade being over 200 m, taller than Ponte, in Hillbrow, and visually as appealing as the Berlin Wall). Nope, my solution is simpler. I will explain. To do so, I will use an analogy. Let us imagine that somebody turned off the power to the President’s house in Head road, Fresnaye, Cape Town. What will happen is that the standby generator will start up. Further, the electrical load on the grid will fall by a few kilowatts, since Head road is disconnected. Now imagine that the Head road house has a switch that is controlled remotely by the City of Cape Town. When it is required to reduce the load on the grid, all the City of Cape Town officials have to do is to open the switch remotely and the standby generator will start up and the electrical load on the grid will fall by a few kilowatts.

Now let’s extend this thought. Imagine if the City of Cape Town calls for anybody who has a standby generator to sign up with them to disconnect their premises and start their generators at times when there would normally be load-shedding. In Cape Town, there are about 1 000 MW worth of standby generators. The agreement would be that the city would pay consumers a sum of money each month to take part in the scheme and a sum per kilowatt of generator which runs when requested. There is no reason at all that this idea will not work. If we recall that new generation (solar, wind, coal, and so on) costs about R40 000/kW installed and has maintenance issues, then this idea of ‘ghost generation’ is a clear winner.

Why has it not happened before? Well, only recently have we had the communication systems that would make the scheme work. It would be a good idea to have a pilot scheme with a few consumers to see if it will work. But perhaps we can leave the President’s house out of it and rely on our fallow South Africans. Perhaps.