Every Friday morning, SAfm's AMLive's radio anchor Tim Modise speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday's At the Coalface transcript:

Modise: The Chamber of Mines is calling for South Africa to adopt a completely new electricity dispensation. Tell me more about that.

Creamer: The Chamber of Mines is not happy with Eskom being both a player and a referee. We can see that the there are new independent power producers (IPP) coming in. What the Chamber is saying is that they should also separate out the transmission of electricity from the generation of electricity and leave Eskom involved in the generation side of electricity along with the IPPs, but rather bring in a new independent entity to actually manage the transmission.

Of course, it is also rejecting out of hand their 45% over three years increase in electricity tariffs, the proposed Eskom increase, but many other people are also rejecting that out of hand. It seems like it is almost dead in the water. We can see other entities now also bypassing Eskom.

Even at this stage we see one big IPP, which is going to produce a power station in Botswana who is now dealing directly with the Department of Energy. They say they are doing that in terms of new regulations, which I wasn't even aware of that have come out, which enable IPPs to now deal directly with the Department of Energy rather then Eskom.

So there are some moves afoot to actually change the playing field.

Modise: A South African is in the process of building no less than four brand new gold mines in Africa.

Creamer: Dr Mark Bristow, the CEO of Rangold Resources is a really a phenomenon. He began in Africa in the mid-90s with his first Syama mine, which was an abject failure, but he then managed to cling on by his finger nails. He produced the Morila mine, which became a gold gorilla and since then he has just been going on and on.

He is already operating two mines in Mali and he is moving to build another four mines, which is really phenomenal. Bristow does it through his strategy of discovery and development. He doesn't go and buy other peoples mines, he actually does the drilling and he finds the ounces.

That is another big part of his success, because he finds the ounces at less the $10 an ounce and we know that gold is selling at $1 000 ounce. That is good business and he has done some phenomenal things in Ivory Coast.

His next mine, which will begin producing next year, outside of his existing mines in Mali, will be the Tongon mine in the Ivory Coast. He has built that even though there were fighting factions between north and south in the Ivory Coast. In fact, he even got some of them together and said that no matter who wins this fight that both are going to benefit from the gold mine.

That is now going to begin producing. Then also in Senegal he has got Massawa, Gounkoto, a new one in Mali, and Kibali, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where that is a little bit different as he didn't discover it himself, but is working with AngloGold Ashanti.

Modise: The Department of Energy wants a million solar water heaters installed in South Africa by 2014. How is the whole programme going to be rolled out.

Creamer: December 4 is a crucial date, because that is the date on which the Minister of Energy Dipuo Peters will receive the report from her department firming up the framework for this project, which will aim at having a million solar water heaters installed in South Africa by 2014.

Now, it seems like a no brainer, we've got the sun and the whole world in favour of renewable energy, but we haven't been able to move very fast in this direction before. One of the issue was funding, so funding needs to be firmed up.

The area still going to get their funding via the Eskom tariff which is a bit of an Achilles Heel, which they will need to work on, because although there was funding from that source before, it wasn't very well managed. As we see no roll-out has really happened.

So, this is really a review of this whole idea that we use the sun to heat the water that we use in our homes and offices. A far firmer framework is now being developed and December 4 will be the crucial date and then the implementation from April next year.

It has a lot of potential spin-off, I mean, this could really create a lot of jobs, they are talking about 100 000 jobs. We have said over and over that these jobs could be created, but are they going to be created and that is why they need someone to manage this well.

They are thinking of setting up a champion, a separate body that will be solar water heating orientated that will manage the whole thing rather then do it through partly Eskom and others.

Modise: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he'll be back with us at the same time next week.