LETTER: Old finance models trump reliable power

James Cunningham’s letter refers (“Incentivising homes to produce solar PV power should already have been done”, January 16).

I believe the core problem is that a large chunk of municipal income comes from the profit (or surplus, as they prefer to call it) from electricity sales. Perhaps municipal finance models are set up like this because it’s difficult to collect rates from those who live in shacks? Much easier to bring in something by charging a markup on electricity sales.

Or maybe there’s another reason. Regardless, the City of Cape Town could, at a few strokes of a pen, adjust its finance model so that providing electricity would become a cost, not a profit, to them. I’m sure then they’d jump to encourage us to save power, like they promoted water saving for Day Zero.

There is much the city could do to encourage home solar too, like dropping or subsidising the R10,000-odd fee for the device to connect back to the grid. It could offer higher feed-in tariffs to home suppliers, and perhaps simplest of all it could encourage/promote solar geysers. After all, electric geysers account for about 50% of a home’s power demand, so replacing them with solar ones can cut as much as 50% of demand from the grid.

This would reduce load at peak times too, since most people bathe in the evenings. All of this would require a mindset change from city officials, who perhaps prefer not to think hard about such matters. It seems they’d prefer we suffer load-shedding, rather than (gasp) do the work of changing their finance models.

Mark Jackson 
Gardens

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.​