Hi everyone!

I have an existing solar setup that I'm very happy with, and it provides me with plenty of power over summer. It might be worth it for me to add another 8 or so 550-600W panels to help me balance out my winters too, but then I'll have quite a bit of excess power throughout the rest of the year.

I'm in Cape Town where they have a cash for power programme where they pay R1.38 per unit, but there's one detail that's missing from the CoCT site. An electrician told me that you're only allowed to feed back in up to 25% of the capacity that your house's feed-in power is. So I assume that means that if I have a 60A supply, I can only feed back 20A? Is this even true? I can't find a reference to this on the CoCT site, does anyone know what the real deal is?

Would especially like to hear from others who feed in residentially to CoCT and what their experiences are.

thanks!

17 minutes ago, highvoltages said:

Hi everyone!

I have an existing solar setup that I'm very happy with, and it provides me with plenty of power over summer. It might be worth it for me to add another 8 or so 550-600W panels to help me balance out my winters too, but then I'll have quite a bit of excess power throughout the rest of the year.

I'm in Cape Town where they have a cash for power programme where they pay R1.38 per unit, but there's one detail that's missing from the CoCT site. An electrician told me that you're only allowed to feed back in up to 25% of the capacity that your house's feed-in power is. So I assume that means that if I have a 60A supply, I can only feed back 20A? Is this even true? I can't find a reference to this on the CoCT site, does anyone know what the real deal is?

Would especially like to hear from others who feed in residentially to CoCT and what their experiences are.

thanks!

Other than the fact that 25% of 60A is 15A...

...you could look up the document NRS 027-2-3:2023 from pg5: UDC

Maybe look through pg37 in this doc: Requirements for Small-Scale Embedded Generation.pdf

This is just to point you in a direction on where to ask questions, gain info or look for answers. I don't know what's the latest status of what is valid/applicable in your municipality (or anywhere else for that matter).

Hi

Yes on a 60A supply you can only feedback a maximum of 15 Amps

Also, for a residential supply, you are not supposed to feedback more than you buy from council

At least not get paid for excess

This is still something that some people in council seem to be unsure about

Then you need to have an AMI meter installed somewhere around R7k but price is supposed to come down

This AMI meter must be installed in a 3 phase meter box on the boundary and accessible from the street

Depending on your current setup, the cost of installing all of this, it could take between 5 and 10 years to pay back for the AMI meter installation. Maybe even longer

18 hours ago, James 1 said:

Depending on your current setup, the cost of installing all of this, it could take between 5 and 10 years to pay back for the AMI meter installation. Maybe even longer

In short: CoCT doesn't want to buy electricity from you for R1.38/kWh. They will rather buy from Eskom for R2/kWh.

29 minutes ago, frivan said:

In short: CoCT doesn't want to buy electricity from you for R1.38/kWh. They will rather buy from Eskom for R2/kWh.

Or Eskom has monopolised the supply and is forcing COCT and others to buy from them.

There is a big gap in the market that the city could be using

At peak the city is paying over R 9 a unit to Eskom

The city could incentifise it so that everyone with solar could install one more battery and sell the close on 5 units to Eskom at this peak

If the city payed say R 6/ unit for peak to the customer selling back, everyone would score

It would be worth investing in an extra battery

44 minutes ago, James 1 said:

There is a big gap in the market that the city could be using

At peak the city is paying over R 9 a unit to Eskom

The city could incentifise it so that everyone with solar could install one more battery and sell the close on 5 units to Eskom at this peak

If the city payed say R 6/ unit for peak to the customer selling back, everyone would score

It would be worth investing in an extra battery

Except for the guys behind the scenes making money from the current deals between the munis and Eskom. You are viewing COCT as how you would view a company you are running or would run. These guys don't operate like that.
In an ideal world, the munis would be doing everything they can to cut their own costs and use the money for bettering services, but this is SA, and things don't work like that.

Edited March 16Mar 16 by Denns

6 hours ago, Denns said:

but this is SA, and things don't work like that.

Agreed, just sad that we can't do the right things first. So, people who can will go off-grid, others will suffer and eventually the distributors will come to off-grid customers and beg them to be connected.

My main concern is that the council may charge an "availability" fee for those that choose to go fully off grid

In this Alphabet economy they only look for the easy buck!