Early this morning a whole pod of Pilot whales beached themselves on Kommetjie Beach, Cape Town.

The 47 whales that beached themselves are suspected to be following the matriarch who apparently beached first.

We arrived at 11am to assist in getting the whales back into the water, around 10-15 whales had already been returned to the sea by other volunteers but unfortunately some of the already returned whales were re-beaching themselves further down the beach onto rocks, making rescue nearly impossible. It was freezing with the icy north wester coming in straight off the sea.

Disaster Management were trying to sort logistics out to get some of the smaller whales transported to Simonstown, but I couldnt see how they would get it all together. They needed hoists, trucks with padding to prevent the whales moving around and a way to get them onto the navy ships and back off again into the sea. Even this might create too much stress for the whales to handle though.

Update: 31-05-2009
I definitely think that Disaster Management hadnt a clue on how to handle this situation. Clearly there was no scenario planning on how to deal with this type of event. I felt that was the situation on the beach when attending the discussions on what to do.

I felt horrible to be there and not being able to help these clearly very healthy animals – they were strong, a guy fractured his leg when one of the whales tails connected him. Most of the whales were euthanased (ie shot) even though they were strong. It was evident that MCM / Disaster management didnt know how to deal with this disaster.

They would have been able to make a massive difference if they knew how to source whale slings (very similar to horse equipment), padding, trucks for transport to simons town (if needed) and boats that are able to carry this type of whale. Its all possible it just depends on the preplanning and willingness of the relevant authorities.

More photos available at: Beached whales

Its always a bit worrying when Eskom wants to build more dirty low grade coal power stations and increase traffics to the consumer by 34%.

But theres some hope on the horizon. The National Energy Regulator (NERSA) recently published feed-in tarrifs for the different alternative energy types. Feed-in allows independant private power producers to sell energy back to Eskom at a guaranteed price.

Technology	Tarrif
Wind	1.25 R/kWh
Small Hydro	0.94 R/kWh
Landfill Gas	0.90 R/kWh
Concentrated Solar	2.10 R/kWh
Solar Panel	N/A R/kWh

Whats glaringly obvious is that there is no price for standard solar power (PV cells) – this will only be released in 6 months time, why?

The City of Cape Town has a 22c/kwH surcharge for Green Electricity, with standard consumer rates at 57c/kWh and commercial at 48.7c/kWh. This is about 50% more than current rates but definitely still attractive to small commercial customers.

The new feed-in tarrif creates several new business opportunities, a wind farm project at Hopefield up the West Coast has been announced and the landfill sites are being looked at to provide peak power by storing methane gas.

One thing that notably missing is a a higher feed-in tarrif during peak power usage times. Such a method would encourage the producers to store and release the energy during peak demand allowing Eskom to reduce its dependance on very expensive to run open cycle gas turbines that burn millions of litres of diesel each year.

Ref: City of Cape Town Tarrifs

Today was an amazing day by all accounts. We have had some much awesome feedback already from the speakers, attendees, press etc.

We have been blown away by the quality of the presentations and how relevant the topics are to a wide audience.

I was trying to keep track of the tweets and we were hitting upwards to almost 10-20 tweets a minute sometimes. #Netprophet trended in twitters top10 for more than 6 hours – heck the conference was only from 8am to 4pm and during lunch the tweets dropped off substantially.

Some articles/blog posts so far:
Netprophet a great success – WhiteWallWeb Blog
Netprophet – perfect wakeup call – Marlon parker
Netprophet-How conferences in SA should be run – Mike Stopforth
The Netprophet afterthoughts – Jason Bagley
Netprophet update from RSAWEB – RSAWEB
Summary of the day – Khalil Aleker