A chap by the name of Eon de Koker who is a specialist electric and electronic engineer has warned the local municipalities to wake up. This is in regard to their shrinking municipal electricity sales due to their existing customers switching to solar.
My solar system is already on order having had to tweak the specifications slightly. What my solar advisor had specified was over kill and was more suitable for a factory than a household. I m hopeful we can be entirely off the grid sometime this month or at worst next month.
What Mr de Koker was stating is spot on and is exactly what I have been worried about as how are municipalities going to fund their spend if their main income is shrinking fast. What he was saying is the municipalities should be embracing solar by investing in roof top space and also allowing smaller installations selling excess power back to the grid. They are currently called SSEG or small scale embedded generation suppliers.
The problem is making it worth your while because currently out of the 165 municipalities 71 had developed an SSEG supply process, but only 43 had published feed in tariffs. Those tariffs varied in payment between R0.32 and R1.30 per kWh when the municipality is being billed R2.40 by the SOE called Eskom.
His worry is that the private roof top installations are out pacing the land solar plants by a big margin. In the last 2 years private individuals have added 3,700MW which is roughly 1.000MW more than solar plants built in the last 10 years.
South Africa is considered the second best country world wide for solar behind Egypt and it is a very close second. South Africa currently has an average of 75% supply from roof tops compared to the world average of 10%. Roof tops are only going to increase with everyone trying to escape the grid due to load shedding. Solar in South Africa has become a must have with over 15 years of load shedding.
The problem facing municipalities is when customers like myself switch over and demand the meters are removed meaning we are self sufficient and have extra capacity, but not at all interested in supplying the grid. I personally want nothing to do with these corrupt municipalities and have no interest in supplying them even if it meant me throwing money away each month. I would rather have no contact and will never need their electricity ever again. If by chance I need to top up the batteries I will use a specially converted generator to do that without relying on the grid.
We all know what happens when a customer base shrinks resulting in less revenue and a s prices will rise making up the short fall in income. This is unfortunately the reality I see happening long term and why more and more people will be forced to move to solar.
