Eskom who is the SOE electricity supplier is anti solar installations as this directly impacts their revenue. The households and businesses that can afford to install solar were the clients they relied on to pay their electricity bills. Due to constant load shedding (18 years) and lack of service people have had enough and found alternative energy.
Eskom has been threatening legal action for the last year now saying all these solar installations are illegal even though they are actually helping take the strain off the grid. You cannot make this stuff up as ideocracy and greed is behind their thinking and there is no logic or common sense.
This week a news story appeared stating that Eskom was going to use satellite technology to map which properties had solar installations and they were going to come after them. The argument they have is you need to register your solar system with Eskom. Blackrock is an investor in Eskom having invested in their debt and I would not put it past them that they are pulling the strings.
This is another money making scheme where once you have registered an Eskom affiliated engineer will come and sign off your installation. Mine has a COC and is legitimate having a registered qualified installer and I am not going to do anything. If the rules change then I will look at this before March 26 and will wait and see how this plays out first as rules change so fast here.
NERSA which is the National Energy Regulator South Africa states all systems have to be registered even if you do not feed back to the grid. Many argued this was no different from a generator being used to combat load shedding yet they stand by the registration which needs to be done by March 2026.
City Power my service provider wants to charge myself R30K or $1.7K just to register the solar installation. This will require them sending an engineer to check the installation is correct which I have a CoC already. I am better off spending the R30K making my system bigger by adding another 1 or 2 batteries plus more solar panels. This increasing the size was going to happen anyway as their HomeFlex supply rates for solar households and businesses is like a double tariff if you use the grid. They are penalizing anyone for going the solar route and not embracing this.
This is all about penalties and how extra income can be generated as we all know the African mentality is that those who can afford such luxuries can help subsidies those who cannot. Eskom said that those solar installations feeding into the grid raised extra challenges like safety and performance so if you don't feed into the grid and have no intention of feeding the grid where is the problem? Offering me credits for feeding the grid when the plan is to never use the grid again does not benefit me one bit. Those credits would be reduced in value and would not represent what they would be charging anyway.
Recently certain areas where their is high electricity theft and non payments they had load generation which is different to load shedding, but exactly the same thing under a different name. I know someone who works for me and they said that the City power offices in their area had hundreds of cables running from their building going to houses in the area. These are all illegal connections running directly from the supplier and someone running the office is getting paid for this.
Corruption is everywhere you look and why I would like nothing to do with the grid and by the time March 26th arrives I will not be drawing 1Kwh from the grid. The municipality can cut my supply and it will make zero difference even if we have overcast weather because we will be prepared.
My attitude and thinking is what many others will be doing and instead of trying to claw back lost revenue through trying to be clever they will lose it all. The suns energy is free and yet the corrupt government is trying to charge for this even though you are losing less electricity helping the grid. There is so much negativity in this country due to no common sense and one can take so much before they say enough is enough and I am so happy I am making plans to leave.