LETTER: Incentivising homes to produce solar PV power should already have been done

While Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s response to the national electricity crisis appears impressive, there are still too many “hopes” and “soons” included (“Cape Town funds what it can,” January 12). In a crisis of this magnitude such words don’t comfort concerned citizens. They are Ramaphosa words,  meaning nothing.

Incentivising residential homes to produce electricity via solar photovoltaic (PV) panels to feed into the grid should not be a “hope” for this year. It should already have been done. If there is red tape, procedures and national competencies obstructing the project, crisis leadership should bulldoze its way past them. It never says its hands are tied.

Thousands of Capetonian homeowners are installing solar PV panels and would like nothing more than to feed excess power into Cape Town’s grid — without the current costs and paperwork. It would make them feel they were contributing to a solution and improve morale.

Let’s call it Operation Dynamo. The word means an electrical generator and was first used for the small boats operation that saved over 300,000 British troops who were  surrounded at Dunkirk in 1940.

Like Cape Town homeowners, the boatowners were reasonably affluent. They had listened and read about the crisis but felt helpless to do anything. When the British government desperately pleaded for help they responded with courage and fortitude. This miraculous  event, which is still remembered annually, may not have won the war but it certainly prevented defeat.

As Cape Town homeowners will respond in the same way, Hill-Lewis must red stamp the memo on residential “net producers” like Churchill did on urgent wartime memos: Action This Day.

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.