Cape Talk, Tuesday night

You're adding a new living challenge and you're supplementing what you're already doing. And thanks a lot for having me. Right. Thank you so much for your time. That is Juanita Kumalo. She's a fitness and wellness coach. She's also the founder of Trove Wellness Cape Talk. You're listening to the best of talk. Recapping the moments worth listening to again. We always spend time looking at different aspects of the South African energy situation. And one of the things that came up, I think this was posted.

By Michael Jordaan, involved with RAIN, but also many people will remember him as somebody who was the CEO of FNB many years back. So he tweets this: Private installed solar of 5.2 gigawatts is now larger than any coal-fired power station in South Africa. And he points to Medupi and Kusile, which presumably this is at their full capacity, would be at

4,8 gigawatts. It's an interesting stat, but perhaps it raises as many questions as it suggests answers. And to explore those, we now welcome Professor Samson Mompwedi. Professor Mampwedi is the head of the Energy Secretariat at the South African National Energy Development Institute. Professor, welcome and thanks very much for your time. I suppose the first thing that occurred to me was it's an interesting stat, and you can tell us if you believe.

But I I would have thought there's a big difference between aggregated power across many, many entities like households, small businesses, maybe small community areas like housing complexes on the one hand and a single power entity, because presumably the way you can deploy that power would be very different between the two. Yes, so this is quite significant.

And it's mainly because of the reforms that were brought in by national government with the introduction of the rebate program. We have long predicted that the future power system is going to be distributed energy, and this is what we're starting to see now. The significance is that you don't have a single power station like what we have with the coal power fleet, where if

If something breaks, then the entire kind of the bigger part of the energy system is basically compromised. Whereas with distributed energy, you may have failures in various areas that may not necessarily affect the bigger power system as it may. So that is one thing. The second aspect is when you look at the coal fleet versus the solar energy, the rooftop solar PV that we