Goodness all these regulations are killing us. Can we not get this country business minded and not regulated to death!
In other words⌠nothing bad happens if you break the rule. Itâs not as if the metro police shows up, or they send you a big fine or something. They just donât pay you for whatever you gave them. By law they cannot. And since you pay them more than they pay you (per unit), and there is a basic service fee involved, you will never end up paying nothing for your electricity. You will always be paying something⌠which is fair enough too. If you want the luxury of a grid connection (even just to fall back on), you better pay for it 
Still doesnât make sense saying they wont pay you anything, cause they already paid (credited) you every month for your export.
If you export i.e. 300kWh per month and import 50kWh / month then every month you got a 300kWh credit at R1 (for easy math) = R3600 over the year. What will happen after 12 months as you imported 600kWh and exported 3600kWh do they bill you 3000kWh at R2.4 (actual rate of import) or R1 (just what they credited you nett) the latter makes more sense.
probably R3000 of the R3600 in credit allowed will fall away.
The 600kWh you imported at R2.40 will be offset against 600kWh you exported (at R1 or whatever that rate is now). You will then pay R1.40 for the 600kWh, or about R900. The other 3000kWh you get nothing for. And you also pay the R200/month (approximately) connection fee.
Edit: This will probably also be done on a month to month basis, so they will probably withhold payment on any particular month on excess amounts you fed in. That would by my guess. There will never be a month where they give you money, they will only offset future months based on what you may have fed in in previous months.
Edit 2: Another way of thinking about it. It is a bit like âstore creditâ. You can only spend it at that store. It expires if you donât spend it by year end.
Itâs usually easier to reason about this stuff in the âsteady-stateâ, i.e. at month 13+.
They could conceivably look back at the rolling 12-month period to determine if youâre above or below zero. From an accounting perspective, this makes the most sense. Itâs dangerous for them to allow you to go far negative in the hopes that you fix it before the 12-month mark, because you might not.
The easiest thing for them to do will be to throw away your credit every month, but that wouldnât be fair. So it feels like a rolling 12-month window would balance well in the steady state. For initial conditions, i.e. month 1 - 11, theyâd just clamp the window to your actual time.
If theyâre feeling nasty they could just say you didnât keep your end of the bargain, so they re-bill your consumption at the standard rate, giving nothing back for the feed-in, and slap you with the bill. Which would be correct, since you didnât keep to the conditions of the concessional pricing contract. But thatâs quite nasty, even for CoCT.
Can someone thatâs done this explain what actually happens?
The big problem is that before you worry about feed in and credits, you have to pay CoCT approximately R11k for the bidirectional meter
Hmm, that quite neatly solves the initial 1-12m period⌠Youâre already so deep in the hole, the math works! (For them 
)
1 Like
I actually only fully re-read the September 2021 update of the SSEG doc today.
Itâs gotten worse. From SSEG doc:
3.3 Residential SSEG Tariffs
As of 01 July 2021, all residential SSEG customers will be placed on the Home User Tariff with an additional AMI meter reading fee. For SSEG customers, the Home User Tariff works as follows:
I. A monthly network access and administration charge
II. A monthly AMI meter reading fee
III. Block 1 (0 â 600 kWh) and Block 2 (600.1+ kWh) electricity consumption charges for kWh consumed
IV. A rate per kWh at which the City will purchase exported excess generation i.e. SSEG Feed-in Tariff.
The monthly network access and administration charge, AMI meter reading fee along with the charges for consumption and credits for exported excess generation; will be billed monthly (as is the case for other City services).
That means youâre no longer paying a lower rate per kWh, but the same as other Home Users. Feed-in payback is still the same-ish. See tariffs. The exact monthly fee is not clear, but the SSEG service charge is gone. Unsure if the meter reading fee will make up the full difference or not.
Also from 1.10:
a) Export
Grid-tied SSEG customers who wish to participate in the SSEG Feed-in Tariff must have a bi-directional AMI meter installed. The City will supply and install the requisite meter, at the customerâs cost. As mentioned in section 1.5 the SSEG Feed- in Tariff is only available to customers who are net consumers of electricity over a rolling 12-month period.
Since youâre already effectively on the Home User tariff, to me that means they will simply stop crediting you, since you no longer qualify for it. Neatly solves that problem for them. You will not be able to make up the fixed charges by feeding in more either.
@TheTerribleTriplet wrote:
Tariff encourages customers to feed excess power into grid
The feed-in tariff works when customers are net consumers of electricity over a rolling 12-month period. They must therefore consume more electricity from the network than what they put back in over the course of a year. The feed-in tariff offsets their electricity bill and, while they will never receive money from the City, the excess power that is generated back into the Cityâs grid, will be used to balance out their monthâs bill.
The higher tariff is only half the issue.
The killer for me (and many) is the net consumers rule.
If CoCT was serious, they would allow unlimited feed in and pay SSEG regardless of how much they generate.
This would encourage SSEG to run as a for profit business.
I have plenty of space on my roof and I would add more panels to my system to sell and make a profit.
Perhaps even some additional batteries to make optimal use of TOU rates.
I could do with a 2nd income.
With net consumers rule, most will just size the system for self consumption.
Why-O-Why this net consumer rule?
SSEG electricity is cheaper than Eskom electricity.
CoCT should want as much as possible of cheapest electricity.
Itâs not like CoCT is going to lose revenue by buying cheaper SSEG electricity.
CoCT will make more money/profit from cheap SSEG electricity.
Agreed! What I understand as to why they are paranoid is if they encourage feed in with no control (so they can reduce this power when it gets too high) then the grid could become unstable.
Jaco tells me that the bigger systems that feed in must provide a connection to the utility so they can do this.
i donât think we will ever have the problem Australia faces sometimes with grid feed-in, we are way way behind them in solar installs
Yeah, weâre quite a bit away from 25%âŚ
Clean Energy Regulator data shows that more than 2.68 million rooftop solar power systems have been installed in Australia in total, as of 31 December 2020; that means one in four homes have solar panels on their roof.
They have generation curtailment being written into their standards now.
Going slightly off topic here but has anyone recently registered in CT for PV with no feedback to the grid? I need to get the ball rolling on my side.
Might even be worth creating a stickyâed thread that gets updated as the regulation changes.
Sounds like a feeble CoCT excuse when we have Load Shedding and Eskomâs 20.5% increase for next year.
CoCT could also sell any excess SSEG to Eskom.
Also nothing to stop CoCT using the smart meter that they control to prevent overloading.
If they could get 100% of their electricity from SSEG at 73.87c/kWh that would be cheaper than what they pay Eskom. (CoCT could set the SSEG rate lower than Eskom).
Not their fault. Thatâs the fault of the electricity regulation act (4 of 2006). IANAL, but it comes down to this: You cannot sell to your municipality. You can only sell to Eskom, and Eskom can sell back to your municipality. Of course that becomes difficult if the electrical infrastructure connected to your house belongs to CoCT.
So CoCT came up with this loophole where, if you remain a net consumer, they can say âoh, we didnât really buy anything!â. Iâm sure there are some very clever lawyers on the CoCT books that looked into this, so I have no reason to doubt their strategy.
Here I think we need to distinguish between ENERGY and POWER. What makes the grid unstable is large amounts of uncontrolled power. The net-consumer requirement is not about power, it is about energy⌠over a whole year. And it is mostly a legal hurdle.
But the 25% limit certainly does make it difficult to really export large amounts of energy too, and there I think you are spot on: That has to be limited to keep things stable.
Also, regarding the 25% feedback limit: the docs say that the limit applies to shared LV feeders. If you want a bigger Amp rating, get a bigger line. So a 80A connection allows more feedback.
The doc also states that feedback of more than this requires a dedicated LV feeder. They donât say you canât do it, they say you canât do it on a shared feeder.