Thursday 1 October 2015

Net metering in Cape Town?

Last week we spoke about net metering briefly in the blog, this week I want to go into slightly more detail, on why net metering is the way forward for Solar Power in Cape Town, the Western Cape and South Africa as a whole.
To quote the ever wise Wikipedia: Net metering is a service to an electric consumer under which electric energy generated by that electric consumer from an eligible on-site generating facility and delivered to the local distribution facilities may be used to offset electric energy provided by the electric utility to the electric consumer during the applicable billing period. So what does that actually mean?
In municipalities like Drakenstein, Stellenbosch and, hopefully a few others in the near future, a Net Metering system is now in place. This allows the owner of a home, a small business, or a farmer to install solar panels on their property and feed excess electricity back into the grid. For this service the Drakenstein municipality charges the consumer R400 per month.
For example, a home owner with a fairly large electricity bill of say R2000 or R3000 per month can install a system that will generate power during the day when they are not at home. The electricity generated by your solar panels on your roof will then feed excess electricity into the grid which will be bought from you at R1,00 a kWh generated. When you get home at night, and the sun is no longer shining, you have the ability to draw on the power generated during the day by your system. Eskom will then charge you R1,00 per kWh of electricity consumed from the grid.
Effectively, you could cut a R2500 household electricity bill to R400 by just fitting solar panels to the roof of your home. There are catches here or there. The municipality will not allow you to go into a negative figure. i.e. If you generate more than you consume, they will nor reimburse you for the extra electricity generated, however, this is offset somewhat by the lower tariff of R1,00 a kWh.
Another concern is that in some municipalities like the City of Cape Town, they have structured their buy back of generated power on a sliding scale, so no matter how much more you generate, the higher up the scale you are and the more you have to pay for that privilege, effectively crippling the advantages of solar power by daily charges that climb and climb the more you generate.
For any advice please feel free to call us or email us and we will do our best to advise you on the best options or even just answer a question or two.
Article by - PVI Solar


No comments:

Post a Comment