I received a few inquiries on Wednesday night, following a national power outage, and I proudly told my callers we had power because I switched to solar an eon ago. I use the national grid for backup. That’s what happens when the State is unable or unwilling to discharge its responsibilities to the citizens. They create other centres of pawa.
Once upon a time, when I worked and lived in the so-called First World (I am using this term very deliberately), I experienced what effective government looks like in service delivery. In a routine shopping trip to a supermarket, a friend of mine was approached by a salesman. They were signing up home owners for solar installation, for free.
The State of Massachusetts was subsidising the private sector to produce solar technologies. The homes would be powered using solar, and excess power would be routed to the national grid for sale to those who needed it.
At the end of the year, home owners who had been powering their homes for free would receive a cheque emanating from the sale of the excess power. Two benefits accrued to the solar manufacturers: They would sell their products and the extra power harvested from infrastructures that belonged to private home owners.
There was more. Because the State was involved, they could impose the quality needed from the manufacturers, many of them Chinese, by the way, eliminating the sort of junk that litters our environment from the cheap imports allowed into our country.
The extra benefit was that heavy-capacity batteries were removed from domestic installation as excess power was stored in the national grid. This made the cost of a new installation cheaper than what an average Kenyan pays.
Considering the amount of sun that shines on our land for 365 days, why are we constrained to supply our people with clean, renewable and reliable energy? It feels appropriate to use that presidential insult that some folks at Kenya Power are not using their heads.
Well, I could be wrong. Folks there are probably using their stomachs, which is why they are still investing in concrete polls and power lines, instead of harvesting wind and power energy that God gave us for free, and in such abundance.
