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Fed up with bureaucracy, loadshedding, and lack of progress, the residents of Parkhurst in Johannesburg are taking the future into their own hands.
By Adam Oxford
Eskom’s acting CEO, Brian Molefe, has admitted that loadshedding is likely to continue for at least two more years. That’s even with a massive government bailout and inflation-busting price rises.
While many of us might take to Twitter or Facebook to vent our anger, one Johannesburg suburb is racing ahead with a plan to do something about it.
I first met Ryan Beech of the Parkhurst Residents and Business Owners Association’s (PRBOA) at a Change Exchange Iris Session debate about off-grid power. PRBOA is one of the most proactive residents’ groups in South Africa, and it plans to turn the area into the most sustainable micro-economy in the country.
It’s ambitious, and it’s certainly not cheap. But it might just work.
A year ago, the organisation revolutionised the way broadband internet is sold in South Africa, when it decided it couldn’t wait any longer for superfast fibre. It put together a private tender and began approaching potential suppliers.
This flipped the market on its head: instead of being told when fibre would arrive and what they would pay for it, Parkhurst residents explained what they wanted and what they were prepared to pay. Then they waited for an entrepreneur who could do exactly that, profitably.
It was a massive success, and many other suburbs around the country now have access to fibre broadband and download speeds hundreds of times faster than ADSL. The pressure this has put on broadband operators has brought prices for internet access down across the board.
Parkhurst isn’t stopping there. Its next plan is to encourage households in the area to convert to off-grid solar energy for heating and electricity, and to build a community owned biogas production plant that will turn organic waste into gas for cooking.
Under the terms of its Parkhurst 2020 plan, PRBOSA wants 2 000 homes in the area to go off-grid, and establish the suburb as a sustainable energy hub and model for other African residential areas.
It’s early days, but Beech has been busy. He and his colleagues have used the same approach as they did for fibre optic broadband. They’ve surveyed their neighbours, found out what they would expect to pay for solar power at home, got names of people committed to making the switch and approached suppliers to see who can deliver on their terms.
By working together and building a guaranteed customer base, two suppliers, Tasol and Dako Power, have offered hefty discounts for complete packages, including solar geysers and rooftop photovoltaic panels for electricity generation.
Tasol, for example, is offering fitted geyser systems from R6 000, and solar systems with battery back-up for just over R100 000.
It’s a coup for grassroots democracy, and the power of community action to implement change on a large scale. If past performance is anything to go by, the rest of South Africa’s suburbs will soon follow Parkhurst’s lead.
* Adam Oxford is the editor-in-chief of Hypertext Media, a South Africa publishing house that specialises in technology issues from across the continent and produces daily news at htxt.co.za daily. Based in Johannesburg but originally from the UK, he’s written for most of the major technology publishers over the last 17 years.
** This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes.
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