Windhoek — There is only one institution that can force Nampower to open up the market for electricity generation and that is the Electricity Control Board.

If the ECB had authority ten years ago and if Nampower were not such a powerful animal in the economic stable, small-scale generation, the ultimate long-term cheap alternative, could have been off the ground helping to ease the energy shortfall.

Electricity generation is not rocket science. Regardless of the source of propulsion, to this day the technology remains a turbine driving a generator. Whatever drives the turbine is immaterial.

In most modern power stations, the turbine is driven by steam - ordinary boiling water producing steam, usually relayed through a loop system back to the source of energy to turn it into super-steam, at a much higher temperature and pressure, and this then finally escapes through the turbine where it turns an impeller that turns a shaft that turns the generator. Nothing fancy, you can actually build a small-scale version in your backyard.

In a hydro power station, it is running water that drives the turbine and with photovoltaic cells or so-called solar panels, it is the energy from the direct sunlight that activates an electric current where two metals of different type meet, a so-called bi-metal plate. For the rest, as far as I know most turbines are driven by steam. Whether that steam comes from boiling water using coal, gas, nuclear energy, wood, refuse, methane, or sunlight is unimportant from a generation point of view. It only becomes important when one considers factors relating to cost and pollution.

The only exception is the rather conventional diesel engine that directly drives the generator. This is typical of smaller installation that are not that small. Katima Mulilo, and Shesheke in Zambia, got its power for many years from two massive diesel generators, graciously left there when the SA army departed. The Paratus power station in Walvis Bay was also a diesel generator set-up as is, to this day, the rather impressive installation at Terrace Bay.

Which is why it is so easy to build a small electricity generator in your backyard. Using a gas cylinder as a boiler and a simple system of copper pipe, a steam feedback system can be put together easily to drive a large truck turbocharger which then turns an alternator, and voila, you have instant 12 volt, 24 volt or even 220 or 380 volt if your alternator is big enough and turns fast enough. This has actually recently been done very successfully by a group of students and it was all published in the February edition of Popular Mechanics. To boil the water in the gas cylinder, they simply used wood.

Of course I do not believe we can supply an entire country by burning wood but my description of a small generating plant is really for a minute installation - a do-it-yourself job. The same principles that apply to micro-generation apply just as much to medium-sized plants, and this is where I believe we have wasted the better part of twenty years by always hoping for an Epupa or a Kudu instead of developing a unique, entirely local industry where communities are empowered by making them the custodians of medium-sized generating plants that burn wood.

We need an installed capacity of around 400 mW. Our electricity demand is in the order of 300 to 320 mW and we seldom exceed 360mW during peak demand and then usually only for an hour or so in the morning and again in the evening. A 10 mW wood-burning generator is not a small installation but neither is it large by any definition. Building such a plant is an easy job for any local engineering company. Building 30 of them is also not an obstacle. Installing this power plant anywhere in any rural area and connecting it to the central grid via cables is also easy.

The nicest part is that 30 different communities can be given 30 small 10 mW power plants which they have to operate using invader bush. Of this there are millions and millions of tonnes across the country. The community then sells its electricity to Nampower which in turn sells it to local authorities and to industrial clients. This is already the case for the entire country. Nampower generates a very small amount of electricity in Windhoek and Walvis Bay. The rest it imports from South Africa, adds a mark-up, covers the costs of the REDs and then sells it to municipalities who in turn add their own mark-up and sell it to you and me.

But before a body with authority does force Nampower to institute a regime of buying from Independent Power Producers, this all remains hot air, or should I say, steam.