Cape Town to fight for right to buy electricity

We are doing this not just because we want to buy electricity from IPPs, but because we believe that the whole institutional regime governing energy in the country is completely outdated and needs to be reformed.
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This on its own will get my vote.

The current Eskom is a total dinosaur and needs to be broken up into useful pieces.
 
i'll only support this if it will definitely lower electricity prices....you know with the massive increase expected in July.
 
Good for CT and all of us if CT win.
Introduce some competition to Eskom.
Hopefully JHB, PTA and PE join the fight.
 
yes pls mrs mayor!

spend my money as its intended and i will have no problem giving it to you, even more to help the people struggling.
 
Having independent power producers in the country opens up opportunities for the city to have data centres from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Elastic Cloud. Having mirrors of those massive providers locally would be absolutely amazing in providing faster services locally, not to mention gaming on console.

My only hesitation or question around this is, would the city be able to raise our prices higher than the national norm?
 
tjma2001 said:
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My only hesitation or question around this is, would the city be able to raise our prices higher than the national norm?
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AFAIK electricity prices are regulated. The city will have to apply to Nersa. Not sure if the regulations only apply to Eskom. In general it should be cheaper, because the city will have a choice of bulk electricty suppliers. If Eskom is cheaper, they buy from them.
In practice it will get a bit more complicated. They will buy some form of baseload electr from Eskom and cheaper supplies from various IPPs. The city will then encourage you to use the cheaper power by means of a fluctuating rate.
For example, power might be dirt cheap between 0:00 and 5:00 and cheap between 10:00 and 16:00 and expensive at other times. You can then decide if you can adapt your usage pattern to use the cheap electricty, or invest in on-site storage, or just use the expensive power.

Countries like Germany and the Netherlands already paid the school fees to implement such systems. It is high time we learn from their experience and start using renewable energy cheaply.
 
The way the city has been doing things lately they will probably force a rate of R5 per unit on the people if they are allowed to procure electricity from IPP's
 
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