Management at Eskom have a new master plan. Unable to foresee the death spiral 5 years ago when solar powered battery back-up systems became a necessity, the master(?) minds have come up with a plan to return themselves to some form of profitability. A better term would be to prolong our agony.
Pre-paid meters do not currently have a ‘fixed’ fee. These are sometimes called ‘service’ or ‘connection’ fees. They are also on your municipal or Eskom bill under various other aliases (any excuse to add an obscure charge).
The executives at the parastatal have seen fit to propose that they will now add this fee to pre-paid customers. Consequence planning or vision was not a part of this strategy meeting. Spending a few minutes thinking forward would have projected that this move may very well hasten the decline of what’s left of Eskom.
In our household, we currently use between 0-6kWh of utility per day. The Eskom feed is more for convenience and the odd occasions that PV conditions are not optimal. The proposed R750-R1000 fixed fee rate means that I can add R9000 per annum (at the lower end) before I have paid for more electricity. There is a planned reduction in the per kW tariff, but for the majority of households, this will make this purchase a lot more expensive. Struggling households are already past the end of their tether and Eskom will simply lose more paying customers.
In many cases, customers will simply add a battery (as in our case) and tell the municipality to please come collect their transformer. A 5kW/100Ah battery is between R18 000 to R28 000 depending on brand and quality. Purely on the fixed fee and before I have bought additional electricity, it would take 24 months to recover that cost. Add R500 to your monthly top up and that time frame and you have a 14 month window to recover that outlay.
The insult and injury is that tax payers are already paying by virtue of all the Eskom bailouts, I am sure an actuary somewhere can calculate what that has cost the 7 million taxpayers per person already.
If Eskom are trying to expedite their demise, this plan will definitely move them in the right direction.
2 batteries please!
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/538821-electricity-price-warning-for-south-africans-with-solar-power.html?utm_source=newsletter
(Our article from February 2019 on the death spiral)
