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Posted
48 minutes ago, Riaanh said:

It is not PV, It is reflective covers on the roof to keep the home cool in summer

Reflecting sunlight back into space to compensate for shrinking polar ice caps. There should be a 'rewards program' for reflectors. :)  Eskom would be in the pound seats right now if they played smart by maintaining the grid and building capacity for a growing customer base before it was too late. Low cost with high turnover would have allowed the economy to grow and unemployment to shrink and plenty of change for silly bonuses. 

Posted

Truth be told, this feels like it suffers from journalistic license. You see it mentions the loss of income and the registration requirement in the same article as if they are connected (and they may well be), but haven't we learned so far that Nersa doesn't always give Eskom their way... why would we expect Nersa to help Eskom here? Just applying some healthy skepticism guys...

Also, I get the feeling that there are generation plants within that bracket above 10kw and below 1mw, big things, that were exempt from registration, but will no longer be. So the draft wording simply refers to plants smaller than 1MW and the journalist simply assumes (it is implied is it not?) that this would include rooftop plants. But will it?

I'm pretty sure this is just badly worded and they are not actually targeting rooftop solar. The mere fact that it feels like a poor April Fools joke sort of hints that way.

Let's hope I'm right!

Posted
16 hours ago, plonkster said:

I'm pretty sure this is just badly worded and they are not actually targeting rooftop solar. The mere fact that it feels like a poor April Fools joke sort of hints that way.

One of my clients is sure that Nersa is about to force Eskom to buy electricity from small scale <1MW generators. He too I think has the document "lost in translation".

Posted

... and anyone growing their own veggies should be double taxed for the suns rays and the rain water that they are soaking up - and then why stop there, what about all the nutrients that they are sucking from the earth!

Posted

On the other hand... there is a general ruling that you cannot sell water (it comes up here in Cape Town, there are people selling borehole water for swimming pools), and the reason why you cannot sell the water is because nobody owns it (including the government). It is a basic right, according to law (though you may charge for delivery). Now I bring this up only to say that in line with this, you probably cannot charge for sunlight because you don't own it, you cannot charge for rain water (fake news saying it is illegal to collect rain water) because you don't own it, and so on and so forth.

Which is why I say... we're probably dealing with a journalist grabbing the rare opportunity to run with the worst possible interpretation of a very vague government document to draw readers... :-)

Posted

Well, the amendment is real, though it says November 2016 instead of December as the article alleges. Looking at the original law, it seems the trouble is with the definition of IPP. I simply cannot see how a residential rooftop plant could be classified an IPP, not if you read section 34(1) of the original. IANAL though.

But there is more. There is a "Norton Rose Fullbright" we can look into. That's a law firm that really exists, but searching for them with Nersa in the same search yields only one useful article: The one linked above. Looking for Lizel Oberholzer, again an actual director there, an "oil and gas lawyer"... that sounds fishy. Jarret Whitehead... well he's a 2nd candidate attorney according to his LinkedIn profile, doing his articles at said company right now, so that yields no additional authority.

But the story seems to go back even further. Here is something from 2015, and that links a consultation paper from earlier that year. Now I suggest reading that as the best source. It covers regulations, targets, feed in tariffs, and yes, some taxes (you are using grid infrastructure to sell your goods). It covers an important issue that is outstanding at the moment: That each metro has its own rules and some areas have none!

From a cursory reading, it seems that it comes down to this: That in setting the target for 3725MW, they didn't account for all the small systems that would spring up and help contribute towards that. The cherry on that cake is section 4 (b), which talks about incentivising grid tied installations using tariff options.

In other words, this article is horribly one-sided and thin on details.

Posted

Reading the original discussion document, I got the feeling they also want to know about all the small plants and add them into their goals for a certain level of renewable energy by 2020 or whatever the date was. Which is a bit like plowing with another man's oxen (to quote an old Afrikaans saying), we as a government have these goals... look... under our leadership our citizens did half the work!

:-P

  • 3 weeks later...

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