Forum assistance and some exposure

[Jaws]

If the moderators feels that this in inappropriate please delete this thread.

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So  a good friend of mines  is a journalist for an Afrikaans womans magazine.

He was asked to do an article on the South African Power crisis.

 

He basically sent me 5 questions (Translated from Afrikaans)

1) How would you recommend the article must be written

2) Does is make sense to invest in alternative energy sources like  solar water heaters, generators and solar PV panels

3) Is alternative energy not very expensive and would it be affordable for the average household to invest in a system now.

4) What advice can you give to the average household to save energy  ( With a few practical examples)

5) Anything else to add.

 

He also wants to add my Name and credentials and company name to the article to give some credibility.

So this is where the forums comes in. I would like to rather just use my name and professional qualifications and then member of Powerforum.co.za  (and maybe even the members name with the most likes on his response) instead of the company I work for. The reason being that I do work for a certain state entity which could potentially be negatively influenced by the article

 

I have already prepared answers to her questions, but I thought that if I open it to the forum members the quality of the article will increase and with the moderators blessing seeing the forum address will have those interested coming over here for more info.

She didn’t want to go to a Solar installers as this would obviously bias the article.

Keeping the audience in mind actually made this a bit harder. This cannot get to technical, I tried formulating the answers as if I would be explaining it to my 60 year old mother.

 

 

 

[___]

1 hour ago, Jaws said:

1) How would you recommend the article must be written

Now that is an interesting question. There is a question on Quora about this, which I also answered, more on the historical side: How did we get here? We got here because the Mbeki administration wanted to privatise all SOEs (which would have been a darn good idea), and then dragged their feet too long. When you know you're selling the business, you don't invest money into it... and that is why insufficient money was invested into Eskom. Now there is an interesting angle on this: The unions objected (of course). We are now again in that situation, where it is about to be broken up... and the unions don't like it. But not many people even remember the previous iteration. A good article pointing out the history would be something _I_ would enjoy, but I cannot speak for others. It is also something a bit different from the usual "JZ and his cohorts stole all the money" (even if that is true!).

[GreenFields]

At the risk of being banned from the forum.

For a women's magazine, maybe approach it with a profile/caricature of the different types of men that have invested in solar, eg. the Doomsday Prepper, the Tech Fan, Mr Moneybags, the Bragger, the Offgridder, Green Guy, etc. And then highlight the potential pitfalls of each approach, be it lifestyle inconveniences, costs, time, effort or psychological disturbance.

But then definitely round it off with a balanced and prudent view of solar that can help it go mainstream, maybe with some superhero(ine) combining their powers to save the world from darkness and from the voracious appetite of the evil power company.

[___]

14 hours ago, Jaws said:

2) Does is make sense to invest in alternative energy sources like  solar water heaters, generators and solar PV panels

Solar water heaters: Yes. Yes yes yes. Stop asking stupid questions and got get a personal loan from a bank (if you have to) and do this. Or use one of the many rent-to-own offers.

Generators: No. Unless you run a business from home and you lose more money per hour than it costs to run the generator. Otherwise just no. R10/kwh or more in running costs, and your neighbours will likely complain too.

Solar PV. If you're building a house right now, then yes. Do it. If you run a business from home and lose money by the hour when power is down, then do it. Otherwise... maybe? We've done the math many times over. It is hard to have an ROI on solar that beats a good investment product.

14 hours ago, Jaws said:

4) What advice can you give to the average household to save energy  ( With a few practical examples)

After the solar water heater and changing all lighting to LED... look at the fridge and freezer appliances. They can use deceptively large amounts of energy. We tend to think they are small consumers since they have <250W compressors, but sometimes (especially as they age) they can run for extended periods. In some cases the combined cooling costs can rival that of your geyser. For example, you might have two such appliances -- typical in many households -- and each of them runs 12 out of 24 hours at 250W... that's 6KWh... heating 150 liters of water usually takes about 8KWh.

Don't bother with gas. It is nice, it is useful even when you need to cook during an outage, but if saving energy or money is the target: Gas saves neither. It costs the same per unit of energy and is less efficient (might want to skip this one if you don't want to answer several unbelievers writing letters to the editor ).

But I kinda like @GreenFields's approach too!

Edited March 7, 2019 by plonkster

[Guest]

To add to Plonksters points ...

If you go solar and everyone is at work the whole day, bar Sat and Sun, think very carefully how you are going to get an ROI.

Using the grid as storage is not going to come to a Munic near you anytime soon.
And selling back to the Munic is not that easy, if at all possible.

So people must be told to think very carefully of how they are going to use the solar power they generate.

And then there is the NEEDS vs WANTS little matter, affecting the cost of solar.

[seant]

Looking at it from what ever side you want to, but when you get an electrical bill for less than R5  you cant beat that warm fuzzy feeling. Especially when I hear people paying 4k to 6k per month. Never mind that chuckle you have with your solar buddies when load shedding is mentioned by others

[The Bulldog]

19 hours ago, seant said:

Looking at it from what ever side you want to, but when you get an electrical bill for less than R5  you cant beat that warm fuzzy feeling. Especially when I hear people paying 4k to 6k per month. Never mind that chuckle you have with your solar buddies when load shedding is mentioned by others

Yes this is a factor not easily added to an excel speadsheet and usually ignored or mentioned as a side note.

In a nutshell - if you have a grid tied inverter without batteries and size your system correctly it makes financial sense now that the panels are quite cheap. Such a system repays itself fairly quickly and every time Eskom hikes the price your system becomes even more of an investment.

This for the case of you NOT feeding excess power into the grid and you have sized your system correctly so you actually use the power your solar panels produce (or nearly all of it).

If you are feeding back (assuming you do so legally) things are not looking that great due to the cost of the tariff you will be forced to use vs the power you can feed in and the rate you get for that. Relatively few well designed installations will break even here and you can never make a profit.

The moment you add batteries and use them in an off-grid scenario (fully or partially) you probably will at best break even taking a long term view if you handle the batteries nicely and don't kill them by overuse or incorrect use prematurely. This is a whole different chapter - if you don't know or care about batteries don't go there unless you have money to blow.

If you have a battery system - it is probably best to utilize your solar during the day as best as possible and to use grid at night keeping the batteries fully charged and only use them for grid outages.

Then I suppose we have a few "meter spinners" with the old style mechanical meters that will turn in reverse if you feed back likely crediting you 1:1 for power fed back into the grid. This makes the most sense if you just have a grid tie and panels as you are effectively using the grid as a 100% efficient battery that never wears out. This is the most cost effective way to use solar. Of course it is not legal.

[seant]

Batteries bear the bank, well maybe. If I gave you costs of what I spent. I bought a bunch of 150W pannels on an auction, later I purchased more 200W pannels from a company that closed down both sets cost next to nothing. The Li-ion battery pack I built from scratch and the inverter I use is a second hand salvaged 3kva UPS . The system has long since paid for itself and we're almost off the grid , with exception of the oven and the washing machine and the convection microwave. We use about 100Kwh from Eskom  a month and being on tariff plan A that gets covered by the free units.

[DeepBass9]

For municipal tariff structures off grid makes no sense, as the battery prices kill the roi. But for farms the line fee is high so off grid is makes a lot of sense. I was paying an effective R5/kWh 4 years ago, I can only imagine what it is currently. If there is any fixed cost component in your electricity bill, the less you use the higher the effective kWh cost becomes, until eventually off grid makes sense. 

So the assertion that you will at best break even is only applicable to urban/suburban situations, rural it has made good economic sense for a long time.

Edited March 8, 2019 by DeepBass9