Clive Burchell, a stalwart of the electrical industry in SA passed away in April 2010 after a long and active career. Clive will be sorely missed by all the people in the industry and the many associations he was involved with, including the AMEU and Cigre. On behalf of the electrical industry, our condolences and thoughts go out to his wife Elise and his family at this time... (more) 

After gazetting a widely criticised 3-year interim electricity integrated resource plan (IRP 1) on 31 Dec 2009, the DoE is now working on the real thing - a 20-year national integrated resource plan for electricity (IRP 2) as required by the National Energy Act of 2008, the Electricity Regulation Act of 2006, and the Electrical Regulations on New Generation Capacity of 2009... (more)

Many stakeholders and interested parties may wish to participate in the development of IRP 2 but may not be aware of the stakeholder engagement process currently in progress, of the DoE website at www.doe-irp.co.za where information and documentation on the process may be obtained, and of the tight time-lines involved... (more)

The Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa (NIASA) has announced that Ayanda Myoli of Necsa has been seconded to NIASA as the Chief Executive Officer of the association from 1 April 2010. He will assume the duties performed by Gert Claassen who will retire on 31 March 2010... (more)

Anybody in their right mind surely understands the life-threatening implications of getting between a woman and her shopping. Didn't Eskom get this memo? Did they perhaps have a power failure that caused the email to be lost somewhere?... (more)

In the normal world, so the Ghost of Good Governance assures me, companies and businesses, large and small go bankrupt all the time when management fails to keep a tight reign on things. Costs escalate and bad debts accumulate and soon a point is reached where the firm becomes insolvent... (more)

As grid connected wind power increases, the impact of wind's intermittency and variability on the grid is becoming more and more of a concern. To counteract this, wind needs a "dancing partner", some form of storage that can level out the fluctuations... (more)

Just after World War 1, it was thought that oil supplies in America would become exhausted in about twenty-five years. The idea of importing oil from the Middle East, then from Persia, or Russia, was considered positively dangerous... (more)

Although hydro-electric power is of importance to the future to Southern Africa, this segment is already of principal importance to several Southern African countries, with Mozambique and Malawi both relying tremendously on mini hydro-power to contribute towards their power generation... (more)

An environment-friendly solution for increasing transmission grid capacity and improving power quality. The increasing connection of renewable energy sources to the power transmission grid creates new reactive power needs to manage power quality... (more)