KAMPALA SHOULD LOOK BEYOND SOLAR LIGHTING

I am currently eyeballs deep into the book “Power Play” by Tim Higgins, a book about the building of electric car company, Tesla.

Tesla is the company responsible for vaulting South African-born Elon Musk to the top of the wealth rankings last year.

It is an amazing read for anyone interested in getting the unvarnished view about how to build anything – the discipline, the struggles and how often successful founders come to the edge of failure only to survive mostly on the strength of a lofty vision.

And it is also an interesting book about the issues surrounding the future of cars and their use as we know them.

One of the biggest challenges for rolling out the Tesla was that you needed charging points around the car routes, otherwise the market for the car will always be limited. It reminds me of a time when, if you wanted to make a journey say to Mbarara, you had to make sure you filled your tank at the start of the journey, because of lack of fuel stations along the way, which is not the case anymore.

A combination of private capital and government concessions have made it possible for Tesla to dot a lot of North America, Europe and urban China with their charging points.

Which brings me nicely to Kampala City.

Plans are afoot to install lighting on the streets of Kampala. This is long overdue given the hundreds of kilometers of paved roads that have been laid in the last decade or so.

The plan as I understand it, is that the lighting will be solar powered.

Before reading the Tesla book I might have been sold on the solar plan, but I have reason to rethink this given our current context and the future.

First off, we are going to have an embarrassing abundance of hydroelectric power within the next year with the long-awaited commissioning of the 600 MW Karuma dam. This is power will need consumers and street lighting will be a good place to start. We know of course that this will cost money to the City authorities but I am sure government would be amenable to some concessionary tariffs for streetlighting. Package it as a security issue and the argument will get a lot of traction.

But money will not be an issue if we repurposed these street lights to not only provide lighting. They can serve as the basic foundation for electric vehicle charging points, starting with electric motorcycles and eventually cars. These cannot be serviced by the solar panels that would be installed for lighting.

The beauty of it is that while solar power is green power, what better green power is there than hydroelectric power.

But looking into the more immediate future, plans are underway to introduce 5G and other communication technologies. 5G technologies will require small cells to be installed at regular intervals for the efficiency of the system to work and these will require power 24/7. It would make sense to design the new poles in such a way as to accommodate these new technologies, which the current solar lighting poles are not designed for. By using the streetlighting poles even services like location finding would be much better than they are today and make ecommerce all the more efficient.

"One of the challenges of Kampala is that we do not have common conduits for infrastructure. That is why every time one utility or another wants to lay their infrastructure they come and tear up our roads and compounds. This is expensive and inefficient.....

If KCCA thought beyond just streetlighting, they would help in alleviating this problem. The streetlighting grid can serve as a useful backbone on which all these other technologies can ride if it uses hydroelectric power and not the current limited solar powered solution.

In the world of finance there is also now a lot of green funding as the west tries to assuage its guilt for messing up the planet. So, funding this project if well packaged might be much less costly than anything else.

And the icing on the cake for KCCA, these applications – EV charging, 5G networks and whatever other uses are planned for the future, will be growing revenue streams for the city as we shift towards electric transport and use our phones more and more in our daily lives.

And for the citizens of Kampala reduced disturbances from workers tearing up our roads every other day to lay this or the other infrastructure.