It is quite incredible, with the power problems that we have in South Africa, that a South African has come up with a fantastic solution, but is unfortunately doing so for an American company.  Everybody knows about Elon Musk, the Pretoria boy who has made it big with Tesla Motors in America, but Tesla’s latest product is called the Powerwall.  It is a lithium ion battery which captures and stores energy saved from solar cell panels for later use when, for example, the power is down or when power is too expensive.  The batteries cost $3 500,00 each and based on my research seem to be far smaller, and cost-effective than the solutions we have available in South Africa at the moment.  They go on sale in America in 3 to 4 months and we will have to hope that they start coming to South Africa soon thereafter.  The bottom line is we have one of the sunniest countries in the world and we should all have solar cell panels on our roofs with powerful batteries which last longer and are more simple and effective than the current ones that then store that energy for later use.  As they do in other countries, people could be encouraged to sell their excess power back to the national grid, and quite frankly 500,000 batteries later we will not have any more electrical problems in South Africa.  Instead, we are going to give billions to Russia to build us nuclear power stations when the answer is so much more simple – the sun.