Going Solar – renewable energy successes.

Its great to see renewable energy initiatives taking off and doing so well.

There are parts of the developing world where there is plenty of sunshine and space is not an issue. South Africa, for the most part is one of these places.

Due to the vast distances and flat(non-high-rise) nature of our cities, public transport is less well established as a mode of transport for the daily commute. A great majority of professionals use their own motor vehicles. As a result of this companies that employ large numbers of professionals must cater for parking. This results in huge parking lots which some would see as a waste of space.

The company that I now work for has made great strides in this area of late. I have been monitoring the progress on this with enthusiasm.

They have made the decision that instead of just putting up cheaper shade net car ports they decided a couple of years ago to design and utilise the parking facilities as a solar farm. Phase 1 is in production and is already producing roughly 3-4 MW during the day.

Phase two is under construction and with completion of phase 3 with a total of 1800 car ports installed the solar farm will be expected to produce 12 MW.

Total electricity usage for the entire business complex, with data centers, is 7 MW so we should see surplus production back into the grid for at least a couple of years.

As more of these initiatives go live and are successful we should see the cost of producing renewable energy decreasing significantly.

Also exciting to watch is the emergence of micro and private grids and when we combine these with IOT enabled hardware and blockchains operating their management ledgers the prospects are even more exciting.

Micro and Private grids are also a strong option in third world countries where communities are currently under-served and public capacity for expansion is still dismal.