Oh No!

[Energy-Jason]

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/384442-eskom-wants-south-africans-with-solar-panels-to-pay-more-for-electricity.html?utm_source=newsletter

[Ian]

All I can see is this accelerating migration to off-grid, which will just make their situation worse.

They are in such a mess:(

[hoohloc]

Yep, best way will be to go off grid completely. Get a small diesel generator for those cloudy days 

[flamegrilled]

1 hour ago, Ian said:

All I can see is this accelerating migration to off-grid, which will just make their situation worse.

Yes

 

15 minutes ago, hoohloc said:

Get a small diesel generator

Yes .Build in a changeover , be it auto or manual.

 

Soon : Zim2 :Season 2 at a Theatre near you.

[Bobster.]

I've been expecting this. We know that in Australia with lots of grid-tied systems there can be problems with excess capacity on bright days or having to feed more into the grid on overcast days.

I look at my own situation. City Power still have to provide me with a working connection but get very little in return. 

Note that at this stage it is a proposal. NERSA have not been a push over for Eskom. 

Is it such a change to have a fixed charge and a volume charge? 

It looks like once again the rich/careless will get the elevator whilst the poor/prudent get the shaft. There needs to still be a subsidised minimal allowance for the genuinely poor. Maybe there still is, the press are not going to tell us anything that makes it look like Eskom have even a small remnant of a heart

[JediNitrate]

9 hours ago, Ian said:

All I can see is this accelerating migration to off-grid, which will just make their situation worse.

They are in such a mess:(

Exactly this.  Just the push i need to take the plunge to go fully off-grid

[Bobster.]

These changes will affect users directly supplied by Eskom. 

Interesting argumenta are being made RE abandoning the sliding tariff: 'Consumers, particularly those on prepaid, are mostly confused by the incline block structure, where the more you use, the more you pay per unit of electricity. Eskom says it is “very unpopular in community discussions” and that some “customers buy legally at the low block and then illegally once they reach the higher block consumption”.'

https://techcentral.co.za/eskom-unhappy-with-private-solar-installations-as-revenue-evaporates/104558/

I certainly see lots of confusion about sliding tariffs in my neck of the woods, but it seems to me that the main problem is that people haven't familiarised themselves with tariffs. 

One problem the city ran into with sliding tariffs is that the lowest ock used to be the first 500 units in a calendar month. Low usage households like mine on prepaid would buy 500 units and "bank" the excess at the end of the month. I quickly built up 2 or 3 months credit. 

Now they have set the threshold at 350 kw/h, so it's harder to bank cheap units because it's harder to have cheap units left over. 

But we also read this: 'At the higher end (Homepower), Eskom says “the use of inclining block tariffs greatly incentivises higher-consumption customers to use alternative energy sources and energy efficiency, resulting in a real revenue loss not commensurate with a real cost reduction”.'

Eskom's position is supported by the South African Local Government Association (SALGA). 

Eskom say that the proposals will increase bills at the low use end and reduce them at the high use end, so I think we know which constituency SALGA speaks for. 

[smurfdbn]

We on Eskom direct and have had a fixed charge for years which has been steadily increasing, about R1800/mth at present before we switch anything on  - will be off grid later this year

[Proxicon]

20 hours ago, Ian said:

All I can see is this accelerating migration to off-grid, which will just make their situation worse.

They are in such a mess:(

I came here to ask exactly this! Thinking by myself last night "who else here recently build a small PV system to combat load-shedding & the ever rising cost of corruption are now moving towards plans to extending their system further."

 With the likes of City of Cape Town, DA & others pushing really hard to be able to purchase from IPP`s, I foresee Eskom heading towards a slow death spiral. Unfortunately, this will be a the cost of the tax payers.

It only logically makes sense to push harder for going off-grid now, shame that the brainless government is digging a hole even deeper for themselves & the entire country.

[GoodweYES]

Hi,

The electricity suppliers argument holds true for an installation without a sufficient battery system that also uses or  consumes large KW power during the night. However ,

1) Most of the domestic Solar PV system users in South Africa also has a battery system installed that carries them right through the night and early morning , that includes as well as during South Africa' grid peak. Currently these installations can or do feed their excess power back to electricity suppliers at way less than the current generation cost. In same cases even normalises/improves the voltage on the network.

2) Most of the Rural factories and farms only operates during the day and at night the factories is closed. 

3) The businesses/factories that has deployed in their parking areas and roofs solar systems that uses large electrical loads at night could be the only ones that can somewhat be blamed by electricity suppliers.

The right logical way for Nersa and electricity distributors to approach this is to disallow large power consumption at night if there is no corresponding battery storage on site or wheeled to compensate/handle the night and early morning load. With disallow I mean regulation that disallows/outlaws night usage or force battery storage.

Even more friendlier or professional is to  do the actual battery storage installation and required hardware themselves at these installations at a large  % discount and even if the extra storage is used they can then charge the units used at night from these extra installed storage at the calculated recovery rate required.  This is how Businessmen thinks not lackeys that now try to recover their inefficiencies from the populous. Some or all the of the cost can be carried by the consumer. This would not pose a financial burden on the industry off course they will have to burden their grey matter to some extend.

The strategy of increasing the daily fixed charge will only result in more paying customers disconnecting from the Grid and thus cause the feedback benefit being lost that could have helped all South Africans.....

I think we do not have competent tariff designing experts/businessmen or strategists working at Electriciy supplier. 

[MockTurtle]

According to Eskom: "That PV customer, on prepaid, would not be paying their fair share to maintain the grid,"

Nope. We're simply minimising our contribution to your corrupt gravy train slush fund.

[Chris Louw]

We pay R289 connection fee per month to be offgrid. Maintenance came to a complete standstill. Last month I had 2 council guys to check my installation and ask what is the rules to comply. The inverter was checked that there is no AC in connection. They said there is no rules yet. Our meter was sealed because we don't buy electricity. I was told if we don't buy electricity they will replace the meter. They must try a new version.

[Bobster.]

Maybe I'm letting the side down or something, but I do give a thought to the energy providers. I am relatively untroubled by load shedding and use only a few rands worth of juice a month. Well done me, and when there's load shedding going on several of my neighbours gaze upon me with envy.

However, City Power need to keep the lights on. It remains to be seen what affect Eskom's proprosals, if affected by Nersa, will have on me (I don't expect it to be that I pay less) but the worse of the evils by far is City Power going belly up because they can't make ends meet. Hitting poor people in places like Diepsloot harder because they have to make up revenues they are losing is also not something that makes me particularly happy.

I should be more dog-eat-dog about this, but I can't and maybe I shouldn't.

As regards Eskom, was there corruption and outright theft? You bet! We just don't exactly how many billions. Did it all occur on de Ruyter's watch? Most of it did not, but in the meantime he and his management team have got to not just supply the country with electricity but replace damaged and stolen equipment, read meters, run accounts and figure out how all that power is going to get reliably generated.

I also don't believe that all of the loss is attributable to internal corruption. City Power knock on my door every so often and ask to see my pre-paid meter. They tell me there is some scam involving moving around pre-paid meters or even selling them. I used to work in the medical industry, on the service provider side but doing a lot of work with medical aids, and I can tell you lots of stories about the nonsense that practitioners and, sometimes, members would get up to make themselves a little richer at the expense of the medical aids (and thus at the expense of honest folks).
 

[MockTurtle]

they're just out to protect their monopoly. do you really think if it was a free market (where competitors can produce/distribute/sell as much power as they want) energy supply for the masses would be an issue? they dictate the rules - this crisis is entirely manufactured by them. and i don't bleed lumpy custard just because its de ruyter now at the helm.

anyways we still pay a meter connection fee. i don't feed back - but those who are have signed up to an agreement that is already stacked against them is it not?

eskom has dug the country into a hole and expect consumers to bail them out. they're just trying to cover all their bases is all.

[Bobster.]

32 minutes ago, MockTurtle said:

they're just out to protect their monopoly. do you really think if it was a free market (where competitors can produce/distribute/sell as much power as they want) energy supply for the masses would be an issue? they dictate the rules - this crisis is entirely manufactured by them. and i don't bleed lumpy custard just because its de ruyter now at the helm.

Well they'll always have the monopoly on distribution. That's not going to change. Even if the IPPs are let in (wasn't that supposed to happen?) there will need to be one national grid with somebody controlling it - as was done in the UK. 

I can't see this as trying to protect their monopoly on generation. If there are no IPPs then there is no need to protect. They're hardly pricing prospective IPPs out of the market with these proposals.

32 minutes ago, MockTurtle said:

anyways we still pay a meter connection fee. i don't feed back - but those who are have signed up to an agreement that is already stacked against them is it not?

eskom has dug the country into a hole and expect consumers to bail them out. they're just trying to cover all their bases is all.

I looked at reselling in Jhb. It is less generous than in CT, and frankly not worth my while. I can only lose unless (maybe) I dig up the whole back garden and plant solar panels, and since that will cost me money that's not really going to improve the situation.

Presumably people who have signed up for a reselling tariff can switch to another tariff? I did that some years ago when I switched from the default post-paid tariff to pre-paid. I don't see, in Jhb anyway, anything like entering into a fixed term contract. I can even switch back to post-paid if I want to (and if I'm sufficiently daft).

So yes, maybe people signed up for that sort of tariff and are now finding that the terms will change. But there was no promise that the terms wouldn't change, you didn't have to have a crystal ball to see tariffs going up each year, and you can just stop feeding back and go to another tariff.

[GreenFields]

It seems like a logical step towards splitting Eskom into separate entities for generation and transmission, to have a separate charges for energy and for network access. I think they should have led with that, because EVERYONE loves the thought of seeing Eskom's monopoly broken.

[Bobster.]

3 minutes ago, GreenFields said:

It seems like a logical step towards splitting Eskom into separate entities for generation and transmission, to have a separate charges for energy and for network access. I think they should have led with that, because EVERYONE loves the thought of seeing Eskom's monopoly broken.

Well one way of interpreting their proposals is that this is exactly what they're setting up for. You will pay X per month to be connected to the grid (in urban areas, not if you live in some piece of the Karoo with nothing for 100 kms in any direction), and then you will pay for consumption.

I dunno. Maybe. Certainly in Jhb if you're not on pre-paid then your bill is split into various components with one of them being a connection fee, and AFAIK Eskom do that in many areas already. So I'm not even convinced that the rather alarmist news we are getting represents that much of a change. 

IPPs are an idea that I like, though how much we'd save remains to be seen. The maximum that NERSA will allow has to be enough that prospective IPPs will get interested. I don't think that having various providers doing the selling and Eskom just running a grid is guaranteed to force prices down. Those IPPs are not going to build wind farms or whatever because they are nice folks who care about humanity, they are going to want to turn a profit and make their owners rich (or richer).

[Bobster.]

2 hours ago, Brani said:

So Eskom say customers with PV are being subsidized by the customers with no PV.

That's so. Remember that Eskom are talking about customers they supply directly. 

Now in Johannesburg we already have a segmented bill for people on the post paid tariff. They pay fixed costs for running the account and for the connection and then they pay for consumption. On prepaid you pay more for consumption but the flat charges fall away. 

Now I'm on prepaid AND I have a hybrid system. So City Power bear the cost of maintaining a connection to my house and I can give them heck if there is a problem. But they are not even breaking even on that connection.

They increase the connection charge every year but it doesn't affect me, and they increase the kw/h charge each year but my prepaid meter now has about 3.5 years worth of credit on it. Who is subsiding who? 

Quote

That would imply of they charge the customers with PV more, my next door neighbor’s bill should go down. We all know that is not going to happen. Their IBT tariffs are also going away, which means lower income households will pay more.

Eskom say that the IBT causes confusion for prepaid customers. I know a lot of people who are on pre paid and are puzzled by the inclining  tariffs and also don't use them to save money (I know one lady who buys a year's consumption in December each year. Eskom probably love her, but she is wasting a shed load of money) . The answer is to read the tariff tables which are in the public domain or for utilities to educate people (it may curb excessive use). So I accept their explanation here but also I'm puzzled by how people with, I presume, the 3 Rs are so confused. I can understand the confusion in poorer areas. 

Prepaying users should pay less. Its good for cash flow. Let's hope they still will. 

But yes, a single tariff will see the poor/prudent getting hit a little harder (though Eskom are not abandoning their special rate for low income customers) and the rich who just pay and don't notice will get relief. Gotta love capitalism. 

Interestingly Eskom do offer a TOU tariff which would pay people to charge batteries overnight and release the stored power when the trariff is high. They are adjusting the time brackets on this, but it stays in place. TOU with some consumer education might help them a but. 

IPPs would do this too. They'd adjust TOU tariffs. Of course they would. In this regard at least Eskom are doing what a private enterprise IPP would do. 

Quote

Eskom’s push to punish the customers with Solar will only accelerate their decline, as most of the guys on this forum will probably look how to get off the grid completely.

if they had progressive strategy, they would be looking to PV customers to help them, not work against them. The better strategy would be to implement peak and off peak tariffs, and in that way PV customers will naturally help them by not using electricity during peak time, reducing the peak demand.

i have read somewhere that if Eskom operated at reasonable and expected profit, it would take them 120 years to pay back the money they owe, excluding interest that debt attracts. The sooner we stop kicking the dead horse, the better it will be for all South Africans.

Imagine yourself as an IPP. You set up a nice plant. That will saddle you with debt you'll have to pay off over years. And ongoing costs. I read recently that somebody got the sums wrong and wind generator blades are not lasting as long as was thought. So now the owners have to take them off line and refit them. This is anecdotal, but we here all know it will cost a lot of money to build a wind/solar farm and a fair whack to maintain it. IE those IPPs are going to take a long time to break even and somebody will have to pay. 

Eskom's concern is customers who feed back in. This results in the "duck curve" and also in less predictable demand because if its overcast in Jhb (as it has been for several days now) then they have to know this and increase output. 

It's much harder to manage, maybe less efficient. 

But they can't go around inspecting every property, seeing if they have solar and whether its grid tied or hybrid. (which will cost money and increase our bills, though will create jobs) So they adjust tariffs. 

The IPPs we all think will solve our problems will have the same problems and seek the same relief. 

Unless Eskom/Government say to IPPs that you must store energy during the day for release at night. Which they can do, but it will cost more and how will they recover their investment? Yep. Tariffs. 

One proposal I've read is to hugely increase domestic tariffs because that's where the wastage is. Big businesses know exactly how much it costs to run their machinery and are prudent with it. 

Edited January 30, 2021 by Bobster
A detail I forgot

[Yellow Measure]

23 hours ago, Bobster said:

Maybe I'm letting the side down or something, but I do give a thought to the energy providers. I am relatively untroubled by load shedding and use only a few rands worth of juice a month. Well done me, and when there's load shedding going on several of my neighbours gaze upon me with envy.

However, City Power need to keep the lights on. It remains to be seen what affect Eskom's proprosals, if affected by Nersa, will have on me (I don't expect it to be that I pay less) but the worse of the evils by far is City Power going belly up because they can't make ends meet. Hitting poor people in places like Diepsloot harder because they have to make up revenues they are losing is also not something that makes me particularly happy.

I should be more dog-eat-dog about this, but I can't and maybe I shouldn't.

As regards Eskom, was there corruption and outright theft? You bet! We just don't exactly how many billions. Did it all occur on de Ruyter's watch? Most of it did not, but in the meantime he and his management team have got to not just supply the country with electricity but replace damaged and stolen equipment, read meters, run accounts and figure out how all that power is going to get reliably generated.

I also don't believe that all of the loss is attributable to internal corruption. City Power knock on my door every so often and ask to see my pre-paid meter. They tell me there is some scam involving moving around pre-paid meters or even selling them. I used to work in the medical industry, on the service provider side but doing a lot of work with medical aids, and I can tell you lots of stories about the nonsense that practitioners and, sometimes, members would get up to make themselves a little richer at the expense of the medical aids (and thus at the expense of honest folks).
 

Yes, you are.

Firstly, I'm no leftist libertarian, and I am not going to apologise for it, or for thinking the way that I do.

In my own case, I have, at my own expense, and using my own (after taxation) money, purchased, installed and paid VAT on infrastructure that will relieve Eskom from their mandate (and until recently monopoly as a sole supplier) to supplying the daily 10kWh that it used to supply me with, sporadically and whenever whenever they felt like it. Their power supply was so erratic and unreliable and I wasn't able to generate any form of reliable income stream working from home. Their inability to fulfill their legislative mandate, I might add, is no fault of my own.

The outcome is that as of today, I am able to provide a far more reliable power supply than Eskom, and I do it both day AND night, so Eskom's argument that I am "...forcing them to ramp up power at a faster rate at night" is total rubbish at best and completely economical with the truth .  

The truth is exactly the other way around. It is because of their inability (for whatever reasons, there are many which I will not go into here) to run a decent utility, (which BTW was at one stage considered the most efficient in the world, notwithstanding the fact that they had a monopoly on supply), that I have had to dig into my own pocket to provide energy for myself. I have incurred personal capital expenditure, and I am faced with current and future maintenance costs for infrastructure which I have, at my own volition, installed in order to meet my needs (to be a productive citizen!?).

I am the one taking the risk of a long-term investment (15+ years just to break even) in something that I doubt that I will ever see a return on. In doing so, however, I have relieved them of their duty to supply my home with that 10kWh per day, which, due to their (self-inflicted) shortage, they can distribute and supply to the many in need. For that, I think that at the very least, I (and all the other home solar power users) actually deserve a big "thank you". In fact, Eskom should actually go on its hands and knees to thank home and business solar power owners, for their fortitude, their investment, their long-term commitment to this country, and their ability and bravery to get involved in something which is not their core competency, and which actually helps Eskom deliver (whatever) service (is left) to those less fortunate.

Instead, Eskom decides that we are the enemy, and punishes us with additional taxation An interesting strategy

           

 

Edited January 30, 2021 by YellowTapemeasure

[hoohloc]

@YellowTapemeasure well said

[Johandup]

This topic can be argued till the cows come home.

I can sum it up with a few sentences.

1. Eskom is in deep financial trouble with no way out. They are also rapidly running out of coal supplies. Due to their own meddling I must add.

2. The ANC has now way of getting Eskom to be ever sustainable again. But they will start adding to the tariffs. Think unfenced petrol tariff.

3. Most of the electricity tariff payments go towards subsidising unsustainable municipalities with thousands of unnecessary kadre workers. This is no secret.

4. This country will run out of electricity for our population.

You need to become self sufficient asap.

[Bobster.]

3 hours ago, YellowTapemeasure said:

In my own case, I have, at my own expense, and using my own (after taxation) money, purchased, installed and paid VAT on infrastructure that will relieve Eskom from their mandate (and until recently monopoly as a sole supplier) to supplying the daily 10kWh that it used to supply me with, sporadically and whenever whenever they felt like it. Their power supply was so erratic and unreliable and I wasn't able to generate any form of reliable income stream working from home. Their inability to fulfill their legislative mandate, I might add, is no fault of my own.

The outcome is that as of today, I am able to provide a far more reliable power supply than Eskom, and I do it both day AND night, so Eskom's argument that I am "...forcing them to ramp up power at a faster rate at night" is total rubbish at best and completely economical with the truth .  

So you've disconnected from the grid? 

The problem that any utility would have is lots of grid-tie systems. You dont have such a system. I don't have such a system. That doesn't mean that there aren't such systems. The question is how many such systems. 

If Eskom can produce data showing the "duck curve" then we need to stop arguing about who they're out to punish and start thinking in terms of solutions. 

There's a bigger issue. You have made yourself energy self sufficient. I'm a way towards that though this run of overcast weather on the highveld is showing me that I need grid or a generator. But if you and I keep our lights on if Eskom goes under, the country is in a world of trouble and so are we and so is everybody else in it.

[Yellow Measure]

1 hour ago, Bobster said:

So you've disconnected from the grid? 

The problem that any utility would have is lots of grid-tie systems. You dont have such a system. I don't have such a system. That doesn't mean that there aren't such systems. The question is how many such systems. 

If Eskom can produce data showing the "duck curve" then we need to stop arguing about who they're out to punish and start thinking in terms of solutions. 

There's a bigger issue. You have made yourself energy self sufficient. I'm a way towards that though this run of overcast weather on the highveld is showing me that I need grid or a generator. But if you and I keep our lights on if Eskom goes under, the country is in a world of trouble and so are we and so is everybody else in it.

No, I am not disconnected, but I am self sufficient. I do not need the grid to survive, it can fail tomorrow and I can provide for those that I have a mandate (and a responsibility) to provide for. The little that I do use (and BTW pay for, and which is under 0.25 kWh per day) is purely to keep my inverter in sync with the grid. I can turn it off with no adverse effects. This past week of overcast weather has proven it.  

Please allow me to correct you once more, if I may: The first and foremost problem that "any utility" has is not grid-tie systems, it''s fulfilling its legislative mandate. If anyone "needs to be punished", then it's themselves for not carrying this out. For not decreasing their expenses, especially in terms of bloated, overpaid and incompetent workforce, and the billions, or shall we say trillions in corruption, as well as their failure to recover funds from their debtors. For not retaining the skills which they so willingly forced out and paid off with golden handshakes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as their failure to plan for newer and cleaner power stations and IPPs.

How and why does this all suddenly become my fault, just because Eskom could not deliver on their (monopoly) mandate? So now all of a sudden I must pay for something that I do not use? "The user pays" principle was great when it was e-tolls, but now the non-user must pay even more than those who use?

Why would I want to pick a reed and start flagellating myself with it? You can do so, good luck, I will not be joining you, and I don't know anyone that is sober and of sound mind that would.

Edited January 30, 2021 by YellowTapemeasure

[Bobster.]

You do understand that it's sub-editors who have said that Eskom are "punishing" PV users? Eskom are not using that language. 

You are also attacking language thst I haven't used. The words "first and foremost" are not mine and you are not correcting me.

Indeed you seem to ignore the points I do raise and "correct" me on things I haven't said. 

I'm also no kind of libertarian. Leftist? Well we'd need to discuss some things that aren't appropriate to this board to figure out who is left or right of whom. 

It might be more helpful if you deal with what I actually say rather than what you imagine my political leanings to be. 

You actually raised an interesting technical point here. Why do you need to synchronise with the grid if you don't use it? Or is 10 kw/h a minimal figure you can survive on but you actually use more? 

Edited January 30, 2021 by Bobster

[hoohloc]

I see that 10Kva silent diesel generators are going for R65k vat inclusive. And the gas generators which are more silent, goes for the same price but for 8.8Kva. Need to start saving up asap, while they are still thinking of screwing us. I would rather get that and have a reliable power than try and make excuses or make sense of how or why I should be charged more for trying to save and provide power for myself. I'm on pre-paid meter and pay for what I use. I paid for my system, no tax rebate and definitely no help from Eskom. why must I help them maintain their grid? Those that, for some reason, feels eskom is rite for trying to get guys with PV system to pay more than what they are currently paying, by all means pay, no one will stop you.