Home for Jon Adams is a Randburg suburb no different to hundreds of thousands of comfortable northern suburbs residents. There are even a couple of solar collectors on his roof that provide hot water for the house.
But here the similarities stop, because the roof also has 36 solar panels each generating 80W peak power to provide electricity for his home.
Adams, general manager of international company Solar 23, which operates in some European and African countries, is heading a pilot project funded by the Central Energy Fund (CEF) to provide electricity from the sun.
Ongoing power outages and load shedding that have become commonplace in South Africa highlight the dependence on electricity, says Kevin Nassiep of Saneri, a research organisation within the CEF that promotes energy efficiency.
“Modern households are extremely vulnerable to power failures as security systems, gates, appliances and water heaters are generally electrically powered. Saneri sees the Energy Island Project as a means of demonstrating the value in moving consumers from 100% reliance on grid electricity to almost zero dependency,” says Nassiep.
Adams’s 36 panels send power into his study, where a bright yellow box channels the captured power throughout the home.
A second, larger yellow box sends excess electricity outside where it is stored in 24 giant batteries. In the event of cloudy weather, this stored energy is enough to meet the household’s needs for three days — so long as energy-sucking appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers are not used.
Using full power — and Adams acknowledges that his four-person household is energy intensive, using a set of fridge/freezers, five televisions, computers, gaming techno-logy and an air conditioner — the batteries will provide enough power for the house for a day and a half.
He has not attempted to cut back on the household’s “energy diet” because part of the experiment is to see how robust his set-up is and gauge the extent to which solar sources can meet the electricity needs of a modern, high-consumption household.
The house uses energy efficient light bulbs and solar heating for its hot water, with bottled gas as a back-up on cloudy days. Space heating during winter comes from bottled gas.
The 36 panels produce 2,8KW peak power, and the cost of the entire system, which includes flying installation specialists out from Germany, is R300Â 000.
Two other houses have also been kitted out with solar-powered electricity as part of the study, the other two producing two-thirds and one-third of Adams’s set up. Costs are proportionate.
The system, which largely uses German and Japanese technology, is known as an island system as it is grid-independent. A chunk of the cost goes into the second box, which feeds excess electricity into the barrage of batteries, not to mention the cost of the batteries themselves.
Grid-dependent systems feed excess generation into a local or national grid. Householders typically sell electricity to the grid during the day when their needs are low and buy back some of it at night when their energy needs are greater.
Germany is the leader in this feed-in-tariff market, with generous allowances for solar-powered electricity, which means that householders can expect to have paid off their investment within a 10-year period, getting free electricity thereafter, says Adams.
The result is that Germany now has 2Â 400MW of installed capacity, says Adams, “bigger than Koeberg”.
Yet Germany does not have a particularly attractive solar profile. Adams says his system is getting five to six hours of sunlight a day, compared to two to three peak hours in Germany.
But with electricity now being an unreliable commodity in South Africa, with load shedding having become the norm and electricity shortages likely to be a feature of South African life at least until 2010 — when Eskom’s new capacity comes on stream — householders opting for solar electricity are likely to include a battery back-up.
Adams’s electricity bill is currently about R500 a month. He, along with a number of players in the sector, is optimistic that South Africa will join a worldwide trend and introduce feed-in-tariffs next year. These tariffs are also known as green tariffs as a premium is generally paid on all electricity generated, the funds generated being used to encourage the growth of new, cleaner technologies. An added, perhaps unexpected, benefit has been that the new clean power industry has seen new (labour intensive) economic opportunities. Feed-in-tariffs are expected by many in the industry to be announced by Trevor Manuel in the next budget and implemented later in the year.
South African households currently buy electricity at just above 40 cents a kilowatt hour. Feed-in-tariffs are generally set at substantially above this. It is anybody’s guess at what level they will be set in South Africa, but at, say R2 a kilowatt hour, Adams could be saving about R500 in electricity usage and earning an additional amount of about R1Â 000 in sales to the grid each month. This equates to an annual value of R18Â 000 or 16 years to pay back the R300Â 000 investment, excluding interest.
I have heard apologists for the present regime raise any number of objections to households supplying power to the grid, apparently oblivious of the fact that this is common practice in more than 60 countries.
Objections include the fact that power utilities have to be sure they are not buying “dirty” power with doubtful harmonics and that power outages mean that an electrician sent to fix a local substation could get electrocuted because the station is still being fed by any number of solar-powered households that haven’t found out that the utility has collapsed. Again.
Adams dismisses these arguments. The equipment which takes the power from the sun and channels it into the home has its own quality control. It also continually monitors the state of the grid when supplying power to it. Should there be a power outage, the power is instantly re-directed to the battery back-up or house usage.
“The use of solar and gas energy for water heating and powering certain equipment will act as an important catalyst for the transition to wider acceptance of solar power,” says Nassiep.
“While technology costs remain high, Saneri intends demonstrating the value of alternative energy in terms of productivity gains for small business, electricity supply to critical installations and the maintenance of security levels at residences and commercial buildings.”
Nassiep says it is expected that additional funding, such as demand side management funding from Eskom, could be used to offset some of the cost of the solar and gas technology used to remove the building from grid supply of energy.
Adams sees the current market for solar electricity as both businesses which want an uninterrupted power supply and high-end homeowners who can easily justify the capital cost against the value of their homes.
But with escalating power costs, continuing supply problems and the incentive of green tariffs, the picture could change dramatically.
It is easy to imagine that in a few years 100Â 000 households would be both generating their own electricity and contributing to the grid, meaning there could be perhaps 500Â 000 people out there that Eskom would not have to worry about supplying.