Just to take one example, Netcare has 51 hospitals across the country. Obviously, a hospital can’t run out of electricity. It just can’t. So Netcare has a fleet of some 200 backup diesel generators. The company will probably spend an absolutely gobsmacking R260-million on diesel this year.
It has now identified 72 sites capable of generating 18-20 GWh of electricity a year. Eskom produces around 200,000 GWh per year. So one company is going to produce about 0.1% of Eskom’s generational capacity. That’s not huge. But it’s just one company. Think of that happening across thousands of companies and homes across SA.
I sometimes think SA might end up satisfying its Paris Agreement undertakings completely inadvertently. It might take a while. But that would be a very surprising slow-burn solution. Let’s live in hope.
The municipality oversees the provision about 70% of the power used in the city, with the remainder falling under Eskom. The discussions, which started about a year ago, form part of Cape Town’s plans to reduce its reliance on the beleaguered utility that’s subjecting the nation to record blackouts.
“We want to supply the entire city,” Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said in an interview. City officials are “engaged in some rather delicate negotiations with Eskom” and are awaiting written confirmation as to whether its board wants to proceed with the project, he said.
Cape Town, which is the country’s main tourist hub and has been led by the opposition Democratic Alliance since 2006, has the most advanced plans to secure its own power. It requires peak supply of 1,700 megawatts in winter and 1,600 megawatts in summer, said Kadri Nassiep, the city’s executive director for energy.
Minister of Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, thinks it’s in the best interest of South Africa’s energy needs to extend the life of coal-fired power stations that are set to be decommissioned. BusinessLIVE reported that last week Ramokgopa told the ANC’s National Executive Committee his short-term plan to ease rolling blackouts included relying on more diesel-powered open-cycle gas turbines and fixing the issues at the five worst coal-powered stations.
But on Tuesday, at the opening of the Solar & Future Energy Show Africa 2023, in a room full of independent power producers, government officials, large energy users, solution providers and academics, Ramokgopa highlighted the government’s huge plans to expand renewables.
“We are looking at unveiling a mega bid window of over 15,000 megawatts of additional renewables,” he said.
We had a 24 hour outage from 18h00 Wednesday to 18h00 Thursday (low voltage).
The (5.2kW Freedom Won eTower) battery was a champ: 40% usage in 24 hours (I think we live like normal people but our consumption does seem to be on the mini side. 130W with the fridge running and around 60W most of the time).
Power was restored at 18h00 ie evening peak.
Battery immediately started to recharge madly, drawing 1800W at the worst possible time
1800W seems enormous to me, though it might be my frame of reference. To say I was fainting with shame and guilt is putting it mildly (And I figured that four suburbs worth of people around me would be charging all their assorted stuff after the long outage, thus risking the subs tripping.)
I surveyed the new inverter board, could not figure what combination of switches to flip, and switched off the house mains till 20h30 when the ESP app said that Eskom was in the green.
I would love a rule: “if grid is restored between 0600 and 0900 or 1700 and 2100, then carry on on battery and delay recharging until peak has passed”, but charging at a more sedate rate would work too? It’s early days but I’ve logged 5% battery usage for a two-hour shed and 10% for a four-hour slot. There’s absolutely no need for the battery to recharge like a demon in the first 10 minutes the grid is back (and the guilt would kill me) but also this business of not killing the cells with kindness There must be a sweet spot.
Ironically Eskom’s coal plants are forcefully pushing us into a green transition.
For most companies today the math is simple :
PV + Storage vs Diesel
You can finance your PV + Storage project over say 72/84 months and depending on how much diesel you burn with the diesel and electricity savings you can easily repay the monthly to the bank (And even be cashflow positive!)
Think about that for a second, there are VERY few assets that you can buy on finance and immediately be in a better cashflow position…
Of course this is based on the premise that loadshedding continues at current levels and diesel prices also stay at these levels (Both very likely)
Exactly yes. I have seen the payback period with some of these systems considering the expense of diesel at the moment to be 18 months or less. And if load shedding becomes better it still pays for it self just over a longer time.
Two things happened in the last year, which is very very hurtful in the short term, but it has a long term advantage.
The war in Europe. This really sucks and there is nothing good to say about it, but one good thing that is coming out of it, is Europe is cutting its fossil-fuel dependency.
The massively elevated levels of Load Shedding in South Africa (and some already starting in California too).
R6000, with no “must be a nett consumer” limits, starts to make this an interesting prospect…
Does depend if there’s still a monthly “meter reading” fee though…
Doing the maths (assuming no fee):
At R1.24/kWh, it would take 4.85mW to pay off the meter.
I have roughly 6 months in the year where I have excess generational capacity, so my napkin calcs suggest that during those six months I could probably generate about 800kWh each month (which means an average of 400kWh per month over a year.
This suggests I could come close to paying off the meter within a year, and then “make money” from my panels after that.
Again, assumes no meter reading fee, which would probably increase it to 2 years, and be a massive pain in the ass during winter where I don’t even generate enough to cover my own needs…
the bigger thing thats broken is that with loadshedding you are losing like 8 hours of potentially prime feed in time per day, and thats going to be the case no matter how they price it
This is the biggest spanner in the works. Another would be that your equipment will work much harder, and possibly break sooner. Something to also keep in mind is tax. Is the income from the generation taxable? Presumably so if your equipment are already written off for tax purposes. So cut earnings with 45%. Something like that. I don’t know tax so just guessing here.
We also had a heck of a night. 8PM to 12PM, and then again 2PM to 6PM. 8 Hours in total over night. Couldn’t fully recharge the EV. Those anti-EV naysayers have a point: without a fast(er) charger, EV ownership and load shedding are not friends.
I really need to get my 6kVA upgrade in place soon now, and I am also thinking 2kW more panels and slap that on the Solis I bought somewhat on a whim
(On the Solis… slow going. It doesn’t look like the document I have actually matches the registers on the thing… and that is bad, really bad. There is no way to do official support if the register layout isn’t well fixed).
It gets worse.
(And I figured that four suburbs worth of people around me would be charging all their assorted stuff after the long outage, thus risking the subs tripping.)
There must be a sweet spot.
