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.
