load shedding gone, ludicrous pricing found

Load shedding, to a greater or lesser extent, seems to have minimised.

The majority of outages are now due to aging infrastructure, vandalism and theft of copper cables. Whilst many will breathe a sigh of relief at the progress Eskom has made on the reliability front, the same cannot be said of the ridiculous and unjustifiable price of a kilowatt from the national utility.

The biggest issue that we raised a good 5+ years ago is an adaptation of the law of diminishing returns. Eskom’s customers who are able to afford electricity, could also not afford to be without it. As more private and commercial customers have turned to solar powered systems to get through the times of load shedding, so Eskom has lost more paying customers. As Eskom has pushed their prices up so those same customers have turned more toward investing further in their existing systems to the point that many households and businesses no longer have need of the spiraling utility.

Municipalities seeing their declining revenues have taken the approach of working against their customers, rather than with them. Threats of exorbitant charges to have their systems compliant with meter changes and threats of legal action for not having these systems registered as SSEGs with the municipality has (and will continue to) backfire spectacularly.

The hyper-inflation type increases from Eskom then being passed on through the municipalities coupled with the arrogant attitude of local government’s visionless employees has pushed paying customers into expanding their systems in order to detach themselves from the grid. Joburg municipality has seen a large uptake in customers who have opted to either add battery (storage) capacity or/and a genset in the odd event that solar has had some bad weather and cannot recharge the storage adequately. This was largely due to their R200 monthly pre-paid connection fee. It didn’t take too much common sense to foresee that more paying customers would abandon the utility altogether than tolerate threats from overpaid and underworked municipal workers with clearly questionable skills. There have been reports of ulterior motives for this sudden uptake in unregistered solar systems. no bribes mentioned.

Eskom is a dying animal, once the world icon of efficient, cost effective electricity production and distribution, it now wheezes its way through bailouts and hemorrhages through failing organs and patching punctured arteries with toothpicks and expensive toilet paper.

The various charitable electricity donations to the needy will face increasing pressure when there are very few paying customers left to subsidize this hand out. the cancerous network of illegal connections will continue to add more hazard to the grid and further erode whatever gains that are made by the machines plastering over the rusted and fatigued cracks of electrical anarchy.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/578718-electricity-price-nightmare-in-south-africa.html?utm_source=newsletter

Shopping Cart