There have been numerous reports of tactics by both municipal and Eskom playground bullies as they try and intimidate and extort paying customers into ‘upgrading and or complying’ with the necessary ‘rules’ related to being connected to the grid.
Numbers being bandied about are from about R27 000 and upwards of R50 000 depending on the bully and what is apparently required in order to make your system compliant. These costs are for structural engineers reports, electrical engineers sign-off, COC’s by the installing company as well as numerous other factors thrown into the pot.
The fact of the matter is that if you have a solar system, and it is connected to the grid, you are required to have filled in a small scale embedded generation (SSEG) application and submitted that to your municipality or Eskom office depending on who you pay your monthly bill to.
The difficulty is that this process does not exist in many a municipality and that no two applications are the same. They differ between areas and opinions. The administrative factor is yet another hurdle. Applications go missing or simply get delayed indefinitely. Then the emergence of what constitutes a compliant system and what does not. The COC provided by the installer needs an addendum for a solar installation. It seems that this is not enough for the bureaucrats at Eskom. Their decades of corruption and ineptocracy and hefty price increases have left a wary, hesitant and highly reluctant customer base.
Once again, Eskom has had a knee jerk reaction with little (no) thought as to the consequences of their latest unholy crusade. At the bottom end of the cost being thrown about to be come compliant, being R27 000, there are many options to apply for Eskom to fetch their transformer.
The large majority of houses that currently have solar systems, operate a 5kW inverter. A 5kWh battery is now in the region of about R20 000, and a 8kW genset is between R7 000 and R12 000. Adding a battery and a genset for the same price will allow a great many customers (in general) to disconnect completely from the grid. The capital outlay has provided you with more storage and in the event of some rainy days you have the genset for back-up power. The capital cost is similar and now you do not have to pay Eskom’s monthly connection fee + demand fee + incompetence fee. There is also the cost of every kW you use from their supply.
There has been a great deal of pushback from customers, so much so, that Eskom issued a press release trying to allay fears of solar customers being persecuted (see the article below).
Eskom’s latest strategy to hasten their demise will work wonders. The West Rand customers were first out the blocks with additional batteries and in 2 cases only gensets were required to get those customers off grid, their storage was already adequate.
Perhaps our intrepid minister of electricity should author a manuscript titled how to alienate customers and slaughter a monopoly, with forewords by the many CEO’s.