My thinking is that when CoCT sees that you are giving them electricity for free, they will probably be okay with that, and simply not pay you for it. The “Thou shalt remain a net consumer!” commandment appears, to my reading, to merely manage expectations. I cannot imagine you would be penalised for something like that!
Mr Smith… what are we going to do now? Heh? You exported 1kWh more than you imported, and that is a breach of contract. Eish sir, what now?
Thanks for the clarification. One of the main hurdles to selling (and getting paid for) electricity to a municipality is that you become a vendor and have to go through a procurement process. This is not really practical for residents. But if this was the limit to exporting (i.e. definition of net consumer), it should be allowed to sell up to the value of electricity consumed (scenario 2 in my example). From the comments it seems there is some other rule that defines “net consumer” based on electricity consumption (i.e. kWh).
Yeah, two things hampering us as private individuals:
Supplying to the Gov, attracts a host of rules and regulations.
Then we have the law ito who can sell electricity.
I HOPE the new CoCT mayor will sort this out in due course, and have an exception for homeowners, like pay us ex-VAT and whatever else they need to do to make the world turn around.
But then the 3rd complication:
3) Income generation and impact of SARS demanding a portion.
Makes me wonder:
With all of the above, I wonder if one was to register a CC and run it all through there. I have a Pty with a VAT no, hence my thinking along those lines.
Registering a CC to make it work easier may not be cost-effective ito annual accounting fees and whatnot, depending on how one does it. That in turn depends on the income generated in the CC, to make it a viable idea.
I got my first indication that all is not well with my SSEG exports to CoCT. I received a new line item on my municipal invoice “Elec Cons adj SSEG Dr” for R700 odd rand. No explanation , no follow letter what it is . I reaised a service request and they promissed to get back to me within 7 days - nothing . I got a friend with insider contacts in COCT and got a reply "The results of the recent audit indicate that during the last financial year (2020/07/01 to 2021/06/30) you have not met the conditions of a Net consumer due to the fact that the value of energy generated has exceeded the value of energy purchased ".
They calculated the excess energy value ( note Energy value in ZAR not kWh and excluding fixed costs) , and have invoiced me for that . The crookery of all that is that the city already already makes R2.00 ( 200% profit on my exports which all go to my neighbours ( without needing a backend infrastructure ) and then further charges me for exporting too much , its absolutely insane - double profit.
So now we know the criteria
ZAR numbers - net value of 12 months - ( so you can export 3 times more kWh roughly than imports )
Its calculated over the cities financial year period 1 July - 30 June every year - they do not do rolling day, week , monthly calculations
2021/2022 financial year has not been assessed as yet
Other than reimbursement required no "penalty imposed "
We have to get rid of all this nonsense for the country to prosper. Cyril must set up an emergency task team like he did with Covid in order to get rid of all red tape that is unnecessary
Well, those are double-edged swords. Many are not particularly happy with the way the C19 one went about its tasks. I mean personally I think it probably went as well as we could have expected, and they disbanded themselves at the due time, but I know there is a lot of anger in some quarters about that little issue…
This is very interesting. They use the ZAR value, not kWh. I’m surprised by this as everyone is under the impression that kWh’s are used. I need to go redo my calculations. And they penalise you for exporting too much. Again, very surprised. I’m fine if they don’t reimburse me for excess exported but to raise a financial penalty just seems vindictive and petty.
I take it you did actually export a lot during the 2021 financial year (some time ago). Two questions:
Do you know how the penalty was calculated? I assume it wasn’t equal to the value of excess exports.
Do they provide some ongoing indication of your “balance”? It will be useful to see how far you are over to avoid the penalty.
You cannot supply the Gov for free, could be drama later, for them if someone complains.
NERSA and the law around power sold/bought … even “donated” power. Someone must explain to someone in Gov, and CoCT has to cross all their T’s and dot all their I’s or Gov takes an “interest”.
They calculated Energy consumed cost ( excluding fixed cost element ) then subtracted the export energy cost - different I had to pay in.for period 1 July 2020 - 30 June 2021. My SSEG has been running since 2017 BTW.
No balance provided , you on your own there to manage
Hah! A bit off topic, but the same trick I (used to) employ when driving on the N1 in those average speed areas. You can comfortably go almost 140km/h without breaking the average speed as long as you know what your running average is. I did one day reach Laingsburg with the average standing on 118km/h…
I stopped doing it because I replaced the car that had the instrumentation. The new one doesn’t allow you to manually reset it, it resets by itself when you start the engine… effectively making it useless.
Many moons ago I drove the 400 odd kilometres between Etosha and Windhoek in a smidge over 2 hours. I’ll leave it to you to work out the average speed. I don’t think that rental BMW was the same afterwards.
I’ve done Windhoek->Stellenbosch in 11 hours and 45 minutes, overnight. Well, not only me, I do blame the “other” guy.
I was driving a guy called Flippie Swanepoel’s Citigolf Sport (the one with the 1.8 engine) and I was told I have to keep up with his friend who was driving this 2-liter Sentra. You may remember them. Young people fast cars of the 80s/90s. So anyway, Flippie promptly went to sleep and I did most of the driving. By the time I hit Clan William I slowed down because I was getting tired. When we got to Stellenbosch the driver of the other car wanted to know what kept us… apparently they waited half an hour for us to arrive… which means they did it in 11:15.
Is it really a NERSA law? I know you can only “sell” services to a government organisation after you’ve been registered through the procurement process (which is very cumbersome). So as long as they’re not buying from you, it’s fine (at least from a MFMA point of view). My doubts re the NERSA requirement stems from two things:
NoordSolar confirmed that they’re using ZAR not kWh to determine “net consumer” so one would effectively be providing more electricity than consuming.
It is possible to install a private pre-paid electricity meter, for example for a flat, resulting in me selling electricity (that I bought from the municipality or generated myself) to someone else. I think some complexes to this on a larger scale. So it’s not only Eskom and municipalities that may sell to private consumers.
Isn’t this R700 then the net energy you consumed and not the excess exported? Otherwise the calc would be the other way around.
What happens on a month-to-month basis? They send you an account with only the total consumption (which you have to pay) and then after 12 months you get a massive credit?
That is actually good news on some level. It means you can push in more energy than you buy, and you can end up with a zero bill (outside of the connection fee of course). The kWh interpretation meant you would never have a zero bill.
The distinction seems to be between “we didn’t really get any energy from this customer, so there is nothing to buy” vs “we didn’t really give any money to this customer, so there was no sale”.
But I would also still like to know where the “penalty” came from, how that is calculated. In Europe, in summer the energy price will sometimes go negative, which means you have to pay the supplier to take your energy. Maybe they have a similar system. But then one would like to know what the rate is
Edit: Maybe it’s a reclaiming of rebates “paid” earlier? They rebated energy and ended up rebating more than was allowed, so they just clawed back some of it? In that case it is not really a punitive measure, merely an accounting one.
Makes sense. It isn’t like they can turn off the huge turbines providing the grid frequency, but no one requires the energy it is taking to make those turbines turn. And they can’t rely on the PV for the base load, so they have X amount of overhead costs for which there is now no demand since the PV can’t throttle. If they introduce a connection fee, it should solve the need for this.
We saw the negative oil prices as well. They can’t really stop producing the oil, but no one wants it and they are running out of storage, so they are willing to pay you to take it away, since storage costs money.
Given the price difference between exporting and importing, if you are still in the position to go -over your export quota, you have to be within a spit of going fully off-grid.
Its not a Nersa rule , its to do with Public Finance ACT xx of xxxx- to supply good/services to a govt entity you have to be registered I not sure with whom ( with SARS/Treasury/ ? ) . CoCT have interpreted this apparently to mean than if you are a net consumer ( 12 months in a financial year ) in terms of value then you don’t need to be registered . They have however done away with the net consumer rule if the electrical consumer is registered as a Business . ( not sure if you have to register with the relevant authority or not ?)
Are there any developments??
I phoned a system installer today and he tells me that there’s a flat R900 per month fee just to be able to export to the grid.
Is this just another cost that I didn’t know about?
