It is all too easy for an ex-tour guide to decide to become an environmentalist and, thus, an expert on power generation and supply.

Next, the said tour guide starts telling everybody what the South African electrical generation mix should be (coal vs nuclear vs everything else), when, in fact, what he or she knows about the subject is four-fifths of five-eighths of stuff all. Then, when he or she discovers that his or her rantings are not attracting much attention, he or she attacks Eskom for being conservative in its approach to power supply and distribution and writes to papers and makes a fool of himself or herself (the delicious thing is that he or she has no idea how foolish he or she is and how much fun he or she gives us, the technocrats). Ha, ha, we laugh, foolish little lads.

But now I find that I disagree with my professional colleagues, especially at Eskom. In 1998, I had a client (and still have the client) who wanted to reduce its power account. Looking at the load profile, I could see that the client was charged on an electrical maximum demand/kilowatt-hour basis – in other words, the client had to pay a sum based on its peak demand from the power supply and also a sum per kilowatt hour. The demand was high but did not last for very long.

Thus, it occurred to me that, if the client switched on one of the diesel generators the organisation had, when the demand was going to peak, it could ‘lop’ the peak and save on the demand charges. Naturally, this used costly diesel fuel – but the peak period only occurred for a fairly short time.

This plan was taken over and implemented by a reputable energy contractor and the scheme worked very well. At the time, I took some engineers from the City of Cape Town to see the scheme and they were all a bit negative about it. They did not want my client “generating into their power supply”.

I pointed out that this was not in fact happening, since the client at all times still drew power from the City of Cape Town system – just not as much. Okay, they said, what happens if there is a system power failure when the generator is operating or the generator goes out of synch? Well, I said, our circuit breaker will trip. In less than a second. They went away and, fortunately, never came back.

Every time I meet an Eskom person, I ask them: Why don’t you allow private individuals to generate in parallel to limit their demand? Oh, they say, we do. They reel off a whole string of large consumers who do this exact thing. But, I say, what about people who can only generate about 200 kW? Oh, they say, too small.

Now Eskom and the municipalities are full on encouraging people to put a blanket around their geysers and use energy efficient lights (which poison landfills) and install solar water heaters and take part in Earth Hour. All these things are truly lovely and very sweet and heart-warming but the hard economics are that one boytjie with a 200 kW genset lopping a peak load in one hour can do a lot more to reduce Eskom demand than a whole suburb of blankets, lights and solar heaters.

Would he want to run his engine to do this, given the cost implications? Yes, if it kept the power on in his factory and if compensation was paid for the power generated. Now Eskom certainly has its mind on bigger things, like spending billions on buying power from gas-turbine operators, so why should they even think about buying power from some Dog Doodle with a 200 kW diesel generator? The answer is it is a very simple concept – just announce that, from now on, Eskom will allow consumers to reduce their load by at least 200 kW by parallel generation at peak times. Give a tariff to be paid. Set operating criteria. Appoint engineers to keep things on track. If it could be done in 1998, it can be done now – there is not one single good reason not to do it, really, really.