If you're a big enough customer, the power companies will do quite a bit for you. On one property, we have recently had a 3 phase, 350A connection installed for free (only to the meter box of course), for our irrigation system. We use enough electricity that it is worthwhile for them.
It's a commodity just like anything else, if you are willing to buy it they will sell it to you
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Somebody should tell our ( only) supplier Eskom ( known as the prince of darkness). The current advertising campaign is pushing gas stoves and solar water heating, and they are even subsidising it.
Solar water heating doesn't sound like such a bad idea in South Africa, or maybe I'm missing something?
Solar water heating and gas stoves, provided, subsidised and advertised by your ELECTRICITY supplier? telling you to use the competition, and paying you ( with money ripped off from the other users) to do so.
Then again, this is the company with a contract to supply electricity to a certain big user at a price well below the generation cost ( even when the contract was signed), and with 10 years to go on the contract.
Don't know about that company, I was just curious if solar water heating in general (without any corporate strings attached) was a bad idea in South Africa?
Not a bad idea at all, Bobby has installed 30 000 plus in low cost housing projects in the last 3 years under a contract ( hoping to get paid "Real Soon" as well for it) and they work very well. Panels work well for electricity as well, just there is no legal way to connect a grid tied meter to the grid.
It makes sense for electricity companies to discourage you from using electricity. Shuffling papers around and charging an administration fee is a safer investment than actually constructing and maintaining infrastructure. You won't cancel your subscription anyway, so that's relatively easy money.
Over here a brand new gas plant was closed because it turned out there wasn't enough demand to keep it running. It would have been a better strategy to avoid having to build it at all and just throw 10% of the construction costs to your competitors.
Just curious, in the US choice of electric provider depends on the state and local situation, but how does it work elsewhere? Where I live there is a power plant in town that is owned by the city. I don't have a choice of electric provider, but outside I can choose any one of about 20 companies. I'm not sure how that works outside the US, but for many years we used to have just one electric company for most of the state until we "deregulated". That means the companies selling the electricity and the companies making it have to be separate. So you can "shop around" for electric service.
I'm wondering, what are bulbs like that used for? I was thinking of helicopter search light's or lighthouses, but after googling a little bit I found that many lighthouses doesn't use anything near 30kW.
Possibly lighting for high speed cameras.
Cinema projection, manufacturing of PCB's and other photolithographic uses. Most common though is for large cinemas as a light source for Imax and 3D display systems where you need a lot of light in a very compact source.
"Just" 5kW can do this. Can't imagine what 30kW will do!