South Africans should have more confidence in their own technological abilities said Dr Christopher Ettmayr of the East London Industrial Development Zone.
South Africans should have more confidence in their own technological abilities said Dr Christopher Ettmayr of the East London Industrial Development Zone.
Speaking at Scifest Africa in Grahamstown on Thursday, he argued that this country has engineering skills on a par with the best in the world, but that national decision-makers lack the confidence to fully back local expertise.
Ettmayr is an economist specialised in renewable energy and related policies. He addressed participants at the Scifest lecture series about climate change and how it affects South Africa and more specifically, its impact on the Eastern Cape.
In his presentation he showed a video of a company in East London that manufactures a 100% engineered and designed South African wind turbine.
He remarked that people often think you must import these technologies because we aren't able to produce it ourselves. He said emphatically, “Of course we are. We've got some of the brightest engineers in the world working on some of the biggest challenges globally, and so we can do it”.
He added that it is now important “… to get everyone to believe that we can do it and then put the right resources behind it” in order to develop the technology.
Ettmayr said the Eastern Cape has already made impressive strides in harnessing wind power to mitigate the effects of global warming, but stressed that there is still so much more to be done. For this reason he appealed to the younger members of the Scifest audience to consider careers in the renewable energy industry.
He explained that while the Eastern Cape, with its windy coastal areas, is taking a leading role in developing and deploying wind-farms, the Northern Cape is a prime location for solar energy.
He also spoke about innovative plans to bring energy to impoverished rural areas where it is not economically viable for Eskom to extend its already stretched national power grid. These plans include setting up mini power-grids that might only serve a specific, isolated community.
Ettmayr said, “so the power will be on site, and each site is unique. Some sites might be very good for small hydro, even hybrid systems, so you can combine it with mini wind turbines. And maybe in an area with very little wind resources, then solar will come in”.
Generating electricity efficiently is a well-known problem, but the public is not always aware of the challenges involved in storing excess power when demand levels are low.
This overflow has to be stored in a type of battery that can release the power when demand requires it. For this reason, engineers and scientists are working on new types of batteries and on how best to store energy for use when renewables aren’t available.
As an economist, Ettmayr commented that some renewable sources of energy are already more cost effective than some of the newer coal-fired power-stations.
He explained that renewable sources of energy are not equally efficient and that they vary between 18 and 45% efficiency. He stressed however, that new technology, some of it developed in East London, is making these sources more efficient all the time.
He pointed out that one only has to look at how the cost of solar panels is coming down all the time.
