Cape Town's own "Jam Pot": the UCT mechanical engineer who put solar on the V&A Waterfront, holds an unreadable poker face, and plays racket sports with heroic, unshakeable confidence and no discernible skill.
◈ Pinelands born · sunshine harvested for a living ◈
Some people just have a job. Jamie went and made his job building the actual future: utility-scale solar farms and rooftops that put clean power onto the grid. Then he clocks off and pours that same energy into poker tables, every game going, a social calendar with no gaps, and a padel career best described as enthusiastic. This corner of the internet exists to celebrate all of it.
A short, entirely admiring (and only lightly roasting) dossier.
Project Manager at Red Rocket, a leading African Independent Power Producer. He takes utility-scale solar projects from development all the way through construction and commissioning, with over six years of clean-energy experience. His job is, quite literally, keeping the lights on.
Source: Red Rocket ↗His flagship: Project Manager on the V&A Waterfront Cruise Terminal rooftop solar farm, a 669 kWp array of 1,100 panels with a 458 kWh battery, feeding Red Rocket's HQ and the Waterfront itself via a corporate power deal. In his words, "a particularly difficult rooftop project."
Source: Red Rocket ↗Full name Jamie Simon Nkululeko Pothier, holder of a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cape Town (graduated 2018). The degree that lets him say "inverter loading ratio" and "virtual wheeling" at a braai and get away with it.
Source: Red Rocket ↗His expertise isn't just steel in the ground: it stretches into energy trading and virtual wheeling, the clever plumbing that moves clean electrons from a solar farm in the middle of nowhere to a customer who needs them. Deeply nerdy. Genuinely important.
Source: Red Rocket ↗A committed poker mind. He can calculate pot odds in his head faster than he can remember whose round it is. The face gives away nothing; the confidence gives away everything. A dangerous man to sit across from with chips on the line.
Video games, board games, card games, "best of three" of literally anything. If it has a scoreboard, a leaderboard or a way to declare a winner, Jamie is in, and he is playing to win.
He plays tennis and padel poorly, and this is stated with love. What he lacks in technique, footwork, and consistency he more than makes up for in showing up, swinging hard, and never once considering that the problem might be him. A true amateur, in the noblest sense.
The man likes to party, and the party is measurably better when he arrives. A reliable source of good nights, questionable ideas at 1am, and stories that get retold for years. The renewable energy doesn't stop when he leaves the office.
Unashamedly a capitalist at heart. Which, when your day job is financing and building solar farms that both make money and cut carbon, is arguably the most productive kind of greedy there is. Markets and megawatts, hand in hand.
Pinelands to the power grid, roughly chronological.
A Jam Pot is born. The Mother City gains a future solar engineer and a lifelong padel hazard.
Cape Town schooling, Pinelands edition. The formative years of the competitive streak that now expresses itself across every game known to man.
Jamie Simon Nkululeko Pothier crosses the stage at the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment, under the gaze of Table Mountain. The technical foundation for everything that follows.
Turns that engineering degree toward renewables, racking up over six years of hands-on experience delivering clean-energy solutions, primarily solar.
Now shepherding big solar projects from development through construction and commissioning at one of Africa's leading Independent Power Producers, with a sideline in energy trading and virtual wheeling.
Manages the tricky rooftop solar-plus-battery build that powers Red Rocket's HQ and the V&A Waterfront. Complex electrical network, many stakeholders, delivered.
The other portfolio: a poker seat, a games night, a padel court he refuses to be humbled by, and a party he will not be missing.
Peer-reviewed by the group chat. Powered by the sun.
"This was a particularly difficult rooftop project, due to both the complexity of the existing electrical network in the building, and the number of stakeholders involved in the planning and permitting of the project." — Jamie, on the V&A Waterfront solar build he managed
This is a fan page, so here's the honest split: the career facts are sourced, the rest is affectionate hearsay from people who know him.