Insurers will be on your case

Biggest insurer in South Africa has a warning for people...

Santam has clear corroborating evidence of increased lightning‑related risk to electrical and solar assets in South Africa.

2 hours ago, Bobster. said:

Insurers will be on your case

Claims are rising exponentially due to climate change and golf...

If insurers have an issue with lightning, they should take it up with Someone higher. If they realise they don't know much about electricity and can't price premiums... Tough!

13 hours ago, frivan said:

Claims are rising exponentially due to climate change and golf...

If insurers have an issue with lightning, they should take it up with Someone higher. If they realise they don't know much about electricity and can't price premiums... Tough!

I've worked in short term insurance and in healthcare (no names mentioned). Certainly the funder side of healthcare (medical aids) and the insurers are heavily data driven. Sanlam don't need to know a lot about electricity to be able to track the incidence of claims involving lightning. Once they see more of these, or more of them involving damage to PV systems, there are various things they can do. One is to adjust premiums to reflect the increased likelihood. Another is to respond to the questions from their clients along the lines of "what should we do?". They will ask some engineers these questions. They will also get expert legal opinions which will inform their position.

Adjust the premiums? Maybe. Or they may add conditions. You have a PV system but no COC for it? You have a PV system and you didn't tell us?

There's lots to talk about here, all sorts of implications and consequences. It is worth making the qualification that short-term (in this case) insurers react to CLAIMS. They can't detect the number of lightning strikes in the real world - though they may consult meteorologists. They do know how many claims they process.

As for your comment about golf balls - maybe they are getting more such claims. Because golf balls now hit the panels on the roof rather than the roof itself, which means the cost to the householder is increased. I have a neighbour whose kids like to play cricket, and they play with a hard ball and they don't take much in the way of precautions. As the kids grow up they are hitting the ball further and a couple have cleared my roof (there may be more that are on the roof waiting for somebody to pick them up). So I can see how this kind of claim could happen (though I'd try to persuade my neighbour to claim under all risks or personal liability, but what's he going to say?).

I also had a different neighbour crash his drone in my driveway.

Maybe I live in a rough neighbourhood or something, but I can see how insurers are getting claims now that they weren't getting a dozen years ago, or weren't getting in such numbers.

One more point I can't resist making about insurance. It is very much a game of probabilities. The more likely a thing is to happen, the more you will pay. Lewis Hamilton probably has life insurance, or insurance against disability, but it will have lots of conditions and the premium will be higher because he willingly participates in a high risk activity.

One consequence of this is that a lot of big companies were told to adjust their attitude towards Y2K. Because there would be claims, and insurers were not going to pay out because any fool knew that January 1st 2000 was coming. It wasn't even a highly probable event, it was a dead certainty.

IMO this is one of the drivers of Y2K being pretty much a non-event: That once corporates understood that they were exposed it became worth their while spending money on this thing that they'd heard could happen. That legal advice was given to the company I worked for at the time, and they can't have been the only listed company in the world or even in the country to get that advice from their lawyers.