This is a move I’m all for: Robben Island will be the first major tourist attraction in Cape Town to go fully solar.
National parks, botanical gardens and other heritage sites will soon follow suit in the conversion to solar, with Robben Island’s historical prison acting as a pilot site for the government’s solar project. The Unesco World Heritage site currently uses diesel-powered electricity.
The gross mismanagement over at Eskom, with crippling results for our country’s economy, has sparked the government to start rolling out alternate and renewable energy solutions. I feel that it is not being taken seriously enough just yet.
It is fantastic to see how Cape Town, and the greater Western Cape, is taking small steps to embrace the limitless potential of solar power – especially in these ‘dark times’ – but I feel that we are still scratching at the surface and need a swifter transition to solar.
There have been rumblings of South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk rolling out his PowerWall home solar energy solution here in time to come. I just wish a viable, cost-effective solution from him would appear sooner, rather than later.
Perhaps he and the government could work something out? In the meantime, we’ll let our visiting tourists get solar power at heritage sites first.