Nobody will deny that the most extensive development in the world has happened in the last 150 years. From 1900 onwards, we have seen the development of domestic electricity and lights, commercial aircraft, various high-speed trains and transport, and so on.

Anybody who studies history will know that the faster development always occurs during the time of a large-scale war. At the beginning of World War I, they had hardly any airplanes. In any event, all the generals believed that the war would be over in a few months and it would not be much different from the wars before. However, World War I was very different and the longer it went on, the more the development of sophisticated weapons (at the time) occurred. The tank was not invented before World War I, but it was very much part of it towards the end. At the beginning of that war, an airplane could not effectively recover from a spin, and to spin the aircraft inevitably led to the death of the pilot. By the time World War I ended, aircraft were spinning, diving, looping and doing many other things.

Electrical development was, however, fairly slow and transport was largely by steam or other means. By the time World War II started, things had improved electrically but, once again, the five years of the war saw extremely rapid development of everything except domestic electrical power supplies. So, radar streaked ahead, as did radio, but no single development relating to electricity could be highlighted as being a sudden development. In fact, to this day, there are some municipal electrical fittings dating back to 1926 which are still in commercial use. Most electrical systems, particularly those for domestic and commercial dwellings, are very much the same as they have been in the past years. They change in manufacturing type fairly slowly, but the basic principle of copper or aluminium inside an insulator made of PVC is still the standard.

It so happens that this is largely due to the fact that, until relatively recently, there were very many parts of the world which had no electricity at all, Africa and South America being examples. This is all changing. Electricity is being installed in these parts of the world and a problem has become evident which probably wasn’t anticipated; as fast as the electricity is installed, it gets stolen. In South Africa, one can go to many of the informal settlements and find that they are electrified, but there is no payment for electricity. There is no point in disconnecting illegal connections; they just get reconnected. There is no point in disconnecting, on a large scale, areas which bypass electrical systems or don’t pay for them; the areas just become unelectrified and deteriorate even further.

This is not a problem that has occurred before in ‘electrical history’. Until recent times, people did not bypass electrical systems (or most people didn’t), but now, in much the same way that we see railway lines being demolished and houses built in their place and houses being built right next to roads, the same is happening to electrical systems. They are being built by a process of installation and theft. It’s almost impossible to stop the theft because access to semiformal dwellings is very difficult and dangerous.

The present system of power distribution forms a central main source that is subdistributed to smaller sources, which themselves are subdistributed to dwellings, will have to come to an end. Things will have to change, such that each user gets their own power in some way. It will have to be a system which cannot be easily bypassed. I have written earlier about people using AC power that comes from a DC source which is converted at the user. You cannot have any power unless you possess an AC source converter.

The question is: What country would want to do this sort of conversion? It will be costly, but in the long term it is the only way to achieve a reliable, long-term power system for dwellings.