[ @plonkster, I though it more sensible to respond here than the DearSA thread ]
I doubt any of the municipalities have any real interest in residential electricity export or finding ways to make SSEG attractive since thye all are heavily dependent on electricity sales for revenue. So, the SSEG rates are not punishment so much as it is that SSEG is something you do “in your own time and on your own dime”.
If the CoJ is to be believed, the electricity increases actually boil down to mainly inflation related increase of the energy cost - they even indicate that their tariffs would be close to cost reflective IF losses are brought down. BUT unfortunately for prepaid users the sudden addition of the service and capacity charges make a very big difference. To some extent it actually does not make sense to my mind that two stands next to one another but with different meters (post vs pre-paid) will have one with capacity charges and one without. I suspect CoJ fell asleep at the wheel after using pre-paid as a form of reducing billing/collection problems and now realised they put the band-aid (duct tape?) over a very hairy arm - from which it now has to be yanked.
If however the electricity rates were my hill to take a stand on, I would definitely ask questions around the impact of the big change to pre-paid on City Power’s liquidity.
City Power is in a very precarious financial position (City Power 2023-2024 Q2 Report)
The company continues to face liquidity and solvency challenges in that its current assets amounting to R6,522 billion are significantly less than its current liabilities which amounts to R21,088 billion. The main contributing factor to the liquidity problem is the overdraft amounting to R14,790 billion. The company is unprofitable due to revenue targets not being met, this is mainly driven by load shedding which resulted in a decrease in sales and high non-technical losses, these are some of the factors that contributed to the increase in the bank overdraft.*
* emphasis my own
City Power apparently,
is collecting R260 million less per month than planned… City Power itself doesn’t collect revenue – the city does (the only revenue that flows to City Power directly is from prepaid meters) *
* emphasis my own
i.e. sudden increased revenue bypassing CoJ inefficient billing/collection straight to City Power won’t hurt the books? (around 275 000 odd prepaid meters). So, it might be a fair question whether pre-paid users are picking up the tab for inefficient billing/collection/finance department.