Traveling Geeks

The story behind Stormhoek

I absolutely love Stormhoek wine. Why? Because they sponsor blogging events, they are online-conscious and to put it plainly, they just get it.
What is it that they get? Social media. The value of giving to receive.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the Stormhoek wine farm in Stellenbosch, South Africa. […]

South Africa Sluggish on Wind Power

In many parts of the world, the winds of change may be blowing towards renewables, but don’t expect the South African government to participate.

That’s the assessment of Herman Oelsner, president of the African Wind Energy Association. Standing in front of four wind turbines in Darling in the Western Cape province, Oelsner told our group of bloggers that private industry and regional governments would have to lead the way. He explained that South Africa is rich in coal, and that the federal government owns Eskom, which provides 90 percent of the energy to the country. Because coal is cheap and abundant and the mining industry provides a lot of jobs, the country has little incentive to change. “The utility (Eskom) is against renewables, and that’s why we don’t have any in this country,” said Oelsner. South Africa currently produces 93 percent of its energy from coal.

The wind farm is selling electricity to the Capetown City Council through a power purchase agreement. “We are ‘pulling a Schwarzenegger’ by working directly with provinces which have their own policies,” said Oelsner, refering to the California governor’s penchant for enacting envirornmental regulations that far exceed federal standards.

The federal government did provide some money for the wind farm project, which is led by Danish investors, according to Oelsner. He envisions expanding the wind farm from 4 to 20 turbines, each with 1.3 megawatt generating capacity, and has designs on adding a 770 megawatt wave power project off the nearby western shoreline. Adding wave power would provide a “hybrid power source” as the waves are more powerful in summer while wind power is stronger in the winter.

Financing for the projects has not been lined up yet, but Oelsner does not anticipate problems. A pilot wave energy project of 5 megawatts would cost about 200 millon rand.

The wave project won’t go forward until a feed-in tariff from the province, which would guarantee an incentive for renewable power, is passed. Oelsner expects this to happen in March and hopes for an 85 cent (South African) tariff. This will give the project a big boost: feed-in tariffs in Germany and Spain have sparked the solar industry in those nations to lead the world. “We have to get a return on investment that is higher than the Eskom rate,” he said.

The mining and energy companies control government policy in South Africa, according to Oelsner. He said his organization was vying to become the first working wind farm in South Africa, but the permits were held up by the government until after a small test project from Eskom could be launched. In this sense, Oelsner’s project is going against the, er, wind.

We blog the world: US bloggers hit RS of A

The idea was to show some key US bloggers what our country is made of: the good, the bad and the complex. I decided to tag along for the Cape Town leg of the tour, which is an exhaustive/exhausting nine-day trek around the country by plane, bus, helicopter and boat. (See 360 degree pic of […]

Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article

South Africa’s Darling Wind Farm

Yesterday morning we visited the Darling Wind Farm. In addition to the three windmills in the photo, there is a fourth behind me. Those four generate enough electricity to fulfill 80% of Darling’s current energy needs.

Of course, not every community is windy enough to justify wind-powered renewable energy, but there are plenty of windy places like Darling that could meet most of their energy needs by installing just a few turbines.

Jouled

Kobus Meiring, CEO of Optimal Energy, briefs the blogger on South Africa’s electric car. Kobus previously headed the project to build SALT, the Southern African Large Telescope, the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere and brought it in on time and under budget.  Click below to listen in.

A Call From the Distant Past

Sometimes when I go to the ocean and stand at the edge of the water for awhile I can fell the pull of time.  It’s not like that eerie feeling on the northwest edge of Goat Island at Niagara Falls, the sense that there’s a slight hand at your back suggesting….

The feeling at the ocean is a reminder that we came from there.  Some serial entrepreneur fish decided one millennium to expand his target market by crawling onshore and here we are.   So you look out at the eternal sea, the waves that keep landing whether or not we’re there to see them, and the sense that we came from there just fits.

Wake up 30 minutes before first light and wait for sunrise in a South African field and it’s the same.  There is something about the air, the light and the stillness that is different from, say, the Rocky Mountains or Death Valley.  It reminds me of those long scenes in the first part of Kubrick’s 2001, scenes in which the camera lingered much longer than we are used to in film, hinting at the passage of eons.

This sense of beginning has some basis.  The San, or Bushmen, are by most accounts the oldest common ancestor of humans, and the tribes originated in what is now called Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.   Our group visited a San/Bushman cultural center and have a trip scheduled later for what is considered the cradle of humankind, so more on them later.

For now, it’s worth noting that an early morning in a South African landscape has some of the same effect as the ocean, an unconscious postcard (“Wish You Were Still Here”?) from a place all of us once called home.

Moving Panoramic Shot of American Bloggers in Africa

We had an opportunity to hang out with the founder of Virtual Africa for a few days in Cape Town. After an amazing 360 panoramic view of Table Mountain and the surrounding Cape by helicopter, he took a shot of the American visiting bloggers, which also includes three South African bloggers in this amazing shot. We’ll cover them in depth in a later post.

360^o picture of the participatingUS and South African bloggers, courtesy of Virtual Africa. Full screen version.

Cape Town Helicopter Flight

We have a truly stunning country.
It helps to have an event remind you of that occasionally. That reminder came for me yesterday. I was immensely privileged to take a helicopter ride through, around, in between, over and about Cape Town yesterday.
It is definitely one of the most breath-taking and awe-inspiring things that I […]

The New Obama in South Africa

Helicopter Ride Over the Cape