Cape Town is set to capitalise on South Africa’s electricity crisis to repudiate power over the country’s electricity supply which Eskom has held a monopoly on for decades.
City management intends to purchase solar panel-generated electricity from businesses and households around Cape Town, which it will deliver back into the grid.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who led his election with the promise to end load shedding, said that the “unprecedented disruption of Eskom’s supply of electricity has opened a legal door he intends kicking down.”
In an interview with BizNews.com’s Alec Hogg, Hill-Lewis outlined how Cape Town is planning to lead the way for other South African organisations to achieve independence by overturning the country's old laws on energy procurement.
Cape Town already has an existing programme to help end the rolling blackouts, but Hill-Lewis asked himself recently: “What can we do outside of Cape Town at a national level to help what we are doing here? Speed it up and get it done even quicker.”
The mayor said that the biggest issues facing independent power producers are not the construction, funding, installation of solar panels, and connection to the grid, “it is the endless procurement regulations, the permissions that have to be sought, the registration from Nersa, the licensing. It is a mountain and a forest of red tape that could really be simplified at national level if there was a proper understanding of the scale of the crisis that we’re in.”
Hill-Lewis said that city management had been brainstorming options on how to speed up this process and cut the red tape.
“We are going to proceed without asking for what’s called Section 34 determination. And just for viewers who don’t know that term, it’s a kind of permission we need to buy our own power from the minister of energy.
“We do not believe that we need that permission. We believe we are in an unprecedented power crisis in South Africa, and we’re going to move ahead without it. And if someone wants to try and take us on about that, then I welcome the challenge,” Hill-Lewis said.
The city has completed the initial bidding round, which will see the development of four applications to help speed up the process of purchasing power from IPPs.
“We are now in the phase of evaluating those bids. We are working on a storage tender that’s going to go out in the next few months, in the next couple of weeks, two weeks’ time. I think we are making a fairly significant announcement on embedded generation for businesses, for big businesses, particularly businesses with huge roof space,” Hill-Lewis said.
Cape Town wants to encourage big businesses which possess significant roof space to sell excess power back to the city and are offering significant incentives. For the first time, instead of businesses building up a bank of power credits will be able to run up credit against their municipal bills for power that is sold back to the city instead of actual cash payments.
Alternatively, the city can initiate a cash transfer at the end of the month for the power that is sold to the city if the producer prefers.
When asked about what is actually slowing the process, Hill-Lewis said that there is one thing that is slowing down the process the lack of political will.
“There is absolutely no technological reason why we should still have load shedding in South Africa. None. The reason we have load shedding 15 years on is because we do not have the political will to focus on the solutions necessary to sort this out.
“And the key insight that we’ve had in Cape Town is that we are not going to wait around for that political will to develop,” Hill-Lewis concluded.