How Will You Use Your Free Electricity?

“Je suis là pour travailler dans l’intérêt du pays

et tant que je serais ministre,

il n’y aura aucune baisse du tarif.

Que ce soit bien clair.”

Ivan Collendavelloo, 2016

The one the CEB will soon supply to you if it does a very average job of using current technology to make us benefit from our geography and topography. See, the cost of producing electricity using wind and sun has decreased significantly while storage has improved enough – one option is a giant version of your smartphone battery – to bring renewable energy close to base-load status. So two things should happen very soon. One is that the cost of electricity – by the way we’re talking clean power here – should fall and two it will be free and even negative on a increasing number of days.

This will require that we tweak our weather reports so they inform us of the expected daily electricity production and its cost which will in turn determine for example when we wash one or two extra loads of clothes and run our businesses a bit more intensively. Other countries like Germany and the UK are already there. We should too. To crawl back from the deep mess we’re in. And not waste another five years.

References

1. Prices Go Negative in Germany, a Positive for Energy Users, New York Times, December 25, 2017.

2. Government Programme 2020-24, Comments, S. Jagatsingh, Forthcoming, 2020.

Should the State Buy the Tamarin Salt Pans?

Because Mauritians have a strong emotional connection with them? Maybe. We have to decide how much we want these 40 or so acres to keep on eliciting those special feelings in us. Each time we see them. Maybe 10 acres are enough to keep our souls happy. Maybe not. Just like we have to reflect on the quality of the decision to use so much coal on an island with one of the world's best air quality. Not very smart for the poster child of sustainability, eh? It's like running a central bank like a tabazi. While the owners of the salt pans have every right to find ways of optimising their assets we have to realise that in Mauritius our land use is not exactly world-beating. Maybe we got carried away with the toxic mantra of 'grot' at all costs?

It's never too late to do good though. Let's immediately liberalise the importation of sugar to help make it easier for us as a country to preserve important parts of our souls. We've been there before with La Vallee de Ferney. 10 years ago. Let's do it again!

2010: The Year in Review

January: The civil society started the decade unsure about who they would be voting as PM later during the year but clear that Paglanomics had to be stopped. Ramgoolam's pathetic second mandate was analysed along the dimensions he said mattered most to us while Elvis is suspected to have commented on the budget. Tens of billions of rupees of FDI were unable to reduce unemployment to single-digits. The audit report will be late just when we needed it the most.

February: 65% of a poll says Sithanen will not stay on as Finance Minister. Union bosses ask PM not to renew Mansoor's contract. The latter cuts the FS to size while Sithanen's university buddy is said to second-guess Parliament. The real reason behind the HR guidelines is analysed. The share of coal in electricity production is now 49 times larger than when Navin first became PM. He also makes a U-turn to announce that the death penalty will be reintroduced.

March: Titmuss never won any Nobel. Lousy economic polices forces a twice shy Ramgoolam to consider the MSM as a potential ally. The job creation record of the two zinku compared. The PM dissolves Parliament and invites voters to a 35-day campaign.

Read the review for Q2, Q3, Q4.

From 1 to 44 in 12

Barely 1% of our electricity was produced with coal in 1996, the first year of Ramgoolam as Prime Minister of Mauritius. When he left office in 2000 that amount had increased by about 20 times. By 2005, when it was Federation 2's turn to tell us ce n'est qu'un au revoir, they had increased it by a further 30%. And since Ramgoolam's return the share of coal in electricity production has reached new heights every single year and ended 2008 at 44.1%.

Berenger is now saying that a Ptr-MMM alliance is gonna save Mauritius. Yeah, right!

How Ramgoolam is Making Mauritius Greener

Last year some 44.1% of our electricity was produced with coal. That's up from 26.8% in 2005 and more than seven times its 1998 level of 6.1%. In the meantime Ramgoolam has come up with his grand vision of Maurice Ile Durable. Turns out it's just another empty slogan or like we say in kreol: enn lot palab.