Here is my Tip for Trevor which I submitted via the treasury's website.
____________

Dear Mr. Manuel,

I would like to suggest a possible short term solution to the energy crisis that South Africa is currently facing.

I believe that the demand being placed on our energy supply can be greatly alleviated by encouraging the use of energy savings devices. The are plenty of these, but I believe the one technology that can have the greatest effect is the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL).

An incandescent light bulb (the typical globe with a filament) consumes around 5 times as much power as a CFL to provide the same amount of light.

Currently the incandescent bulbs are MUCH cheaper than CFLs. Interestingly CFLs are about 5x more expensive than normal incandescent bulbs, which means that people focussed purely on direct cost are biased towards replacing bulbs with incandescents instead of CFLs.

The lifetime of a CFL is 6000hrs versus 750hrs for an incandescent - that means 8 incandescent bulbs for every one CFL. Even with RSA's cheap electricity a CFL "pays" for itself in electricity savings in the first year of use.

Census 2001 says that there are 7 815 270 households that use electricity as there main source of lighting. If each of those households were to change 1 single 60W incandescent bulb to an 11 watt CFL (which provides equivalent light) then the energy saving would be of at least 1.5GWh (gigawatt hours) PER DAY. (calculated as, (60-11) * housholds * 4, which makes the assumption that the light is on for 4 hours of the day).

Other than reducing carbon emissions drastically this would also hopefully help to reduce the load on Eskom's power grid. Obviously as business also would have an incentive to apply energy saving techniques there would be even greater savings, and reduction in peak load.

I would like to see energy efficient lighting (like CFLs) subsidised to make it more accessible to everyone, and energy inefficient lighting (like incandescent bulbs) taxed. The tax can go towards the efficient lighting subsidy, and also towards researching and implementing other energy savings products.

With the lifetime of incandescent bulbs being approximately 6 months (750hrs at 4hrs a day), the impact of such a change would take effect relatively quickly (compared to building more infrastructure).

I hope that this idea, whether it is valid or not, has at least stimulated some thoughts on some of the easy ways that we could go about reducing the energy crisis in the interim while infrastructure is provided for new growth.

Thank you for contribution to our country through your financial guidance and wisdom.

Kind regards,
Duncan Drennan (electronic engineer and business owner)