New Director – Justice Chihota

It is with great pleasure that Moonshot Dynamics announces the on-boarding of Justice Chihota in the position of company Director.Justice studied at the University of Cape Town where he earned both his Bachelor’s (2014) and Master’s (2015) degrees in Electrical Engineering. He has recently completed his PhD at the same institution and is awaiting graduation. Justice’s postgraduate research dealt with the calculations at the core of electricity distribution and electrification systems – the design of new projects, assessment of the adequacy of existing infrastructure, and the integration of renewable energy generation into local and national networks. These are high priority topics for South Africa, and for most other countries too. Specifically, Mr Chihota has improved an algebraic algorithm already incorporated in the South African national standards (SANS 507) for low voltage electrification by removing some of the inaccurate assumptions and extending its application to medium and high voltage systems. His new mathematical probabilistic transform is relevant to electricity network designers and power system operators worldwide. The novel approach and its applications have been published through several conference papers and journals. Mr Chihota has participated in two major industry-collaborated projects, demonstrating the importance of his expertise. The first was the PV (photovoltaic) Uptake Project with Eskom, City of Cape Town and two other universities, for which he carried out most of the design calculations for the main technical report and for the workshops held for government, utility and other stakeholders in the field of renewable energy. The second project is the Green Energy Systems research for Eskom, co-funded by the Department of Trade & Industry, to derive statistical models of loads and distributed generation to use with his new algorithm in assessing and designing for the integration of renewable energy into medium and high voltage networks. Currently, Justice is working at the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies (CRSES) at Stellenbosch University as a post-doctoral fellow. His new position involves research into the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), particularly battery energy storage systems (BESS) and electric vehicles (EV), into the utility grid. Furthermore, Justice is a member of the Load Research Chapter of South Africa (LRCSA). The LRCSA constitutes researchers and planning engineers with expertise in load modelling and its applications. The objective of the LRCSA is to collect and analyse load data for the development of load models and the assessment of the adequacy of existing models. The LRCSA feeds directly into the development of national regulatory standards.