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While the experts seem to agree that Eskom is out of control, the City of Cape Town will now allow households to apply to earn cash for excess power generated by their solar power systems.

It’s nice when you have forward-thinking and competent people in charge, ne?

Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis declared at the city’s 2050 Energy Strategy announcement on February 12, that the first round of Cash for Power applications will be accepted until March 8, 2024.

The Energy Strategy lays out a road map for 2050, including short-term initiatives to safeguard the metro from the first four stages of Eskom load-shedding by 2026.

‘Today, Cape Town becomes the first city with a formally adopted Energy Strategy, which clearly outlines how we plan to end load-shedding as the most important action we can take for job-creating economic growth.”

“In the short-term, we are planning for four stages of load-shedding protection by 2026, as we make the great transition from unreliable, costly, and fossil fuel-based Eskom energy, to an increasingly decentralised supply of reliable, cost-effective, carbon neutral energy from a diverse range of suppliers.”

Under this program, the city says it will buy ‘as much power as much power as residents can supply’. Mayor Hill-Lewis took a swipe at President Cyril Ramaphosa for saying the worst of load-shedding was behind the country in his 2024 State of the Nation Address, only to hit us with Stage 6 a day later.

“The fact is that load-shedding has gotten considerably worse after every such promise, and already we have re-entered stage six. It should be obvious to all by now that we cannot wait for the same people who created the crisis to fix it. We must do so ourselves.”

Currently, the city has only permitted consumers to earn credit for sending power back into the grid. Despite this constraint, it outperforms the rest of the country’s metropolitan areas.

The Cash for Power applications will be available to all residential customers on the home user tariff that has an ‘authorised grid-tied SSEG (small-scale embedded generation) installation and a bidirectional AMI metre to feed power back into the grid’.

Solar users will, however, have to register on both the City Supplier Database and the National Treasury Web-Based Central Supplier Database (CSD) as a service provider. Anyone interested in applying to take over Eskom’s job can submit their applications to hoosain.essop@capetown.gov.za.

“Overall, Cape Town is planning to add up to one gigawatt of independent power supply to end load-shedding in the city over time, with the first 650MW of this within five years, including enough to protect against four Eskom load-shedding stages by 2026,” the city said.

In addition to the Cash for Power campaign, the city has established a voluntary Power Heroes initiative for residents who agree to let the metro switch off their geysers remotely during high-demand hours.

The benefit of this option is that it allows the user to get one lower stage of load-shedding.

This news makes the case for getting onto Versofy’s Solar rent-to-own service even stronger. Not only can you kick Eskom, but at affordable monthly rates, you might even make a bit of money on the side.

It’s a renewables boom time in Cape Town, so don’t miss out.

[source:mybroadband]