City of Cape Town considering smart home electricity devices

[Currantly]

CAPE TOWN - After power cuts at the weekend, the City of Cape Town is even more determined to gain the right to procure and sell its own renewable energy.

The metro's customers were once again shielded from the full effects of the blackouts, thanks to the hydro-power generating plant at the Steenbras dam.

Executive director for energy and climate Kadri Nassiep said the use of renewables speaks to newly elected mayor, Geordin Hill Lewis's campaign promises.

Linky

 

[Gordon_R]

Feasibility study...

 

[WAslayer]

Cool, go for it.. just make sure that I am paying less for your electricity and of you cannot offer that, give me the option to still get my electricity from Eskom..

Sure, it be great to not have to deal with loadshedding but, not if it comes at a significantly higher cost..

 

[Tariqe]

trying to get an email address for the reporter Saya Pierce-Jones, to ask her to write an article to make it feasible cost wise for people with solar installations to feed in to the grid and in the process helping Cape Town becoming self sufficient with it's electricity problem

 

[richjdavies]

You know what... City of Cape Town commissions "smart city" stuff every few years, but very little seems to happen...

Will have to dust off the "loraWAN" thing I helped with and repitch that!

 

[itareanlnotani]

I posted some studies done on upgrading the existing Hydro in WC in the hydro power thread.

Costs are quite reasonable, surprising it hasn't been done already to be honest.

Linky - https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/hydro-electricity.1163260/post-28423626

Fairly obvious from the article, that this ISN'T what they're talking about though -

"What we will be looking at and where they may well play a role is when we move towards a more advanced load management control which means we will be able to do interventions and installations of a particular smart device to pass over control to the home owner to allow them to manage their electricity demand more efficiently and more smartly. So that is being assessed at present and should it be viable subject to a feasibility study, we're looking at the mechanics of how that would be rolled out."

Reading the not so subtext, what they're talking about is (mandated) demand side load reduction.
i.e. we don't have enough power, we're going to shut off your Geyser.

This would be best done with financial incentive really, i.e. Time of Use billing. The meter rollout for that is going nowhere fast though.

 

[wingnut771]

I posted some studies done on upgrading the existing Hydro in WC in the hydro power thread.

Costs are quite reasonable, surprising it hasn't been done already to be honest.

Linky - https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/hydro-electricity.1163260/post-28423626

because they need it for rolling blackouts?

 

[itareanlnotani]

You know what... City of Cape Town commissions "smart city" stuff every few years, but very little seems to happen...

Will have to dust off the "loraWAN" thing I helped with and repitch that!

Lora / Sigfox / NBIoT / 4g

Lora is good, but little rollout. Embedding in meters would be good to extend the network though.
Sigfox - the licencee in SA is apparently a huge pain to deal with.
NBIoT / "2g" -> 4g (i.e. LTE Cat-M1, M2...) - the market seems to have settled on this - at least for fixed devices with power, plus the cell companies - notables Vodacom seem happier with this.

Personally I like Lorawan, as you can run your own gateway fairly easily, plus its cheap/low power.

CoCT meters will have power, so who knows what they'll use to talk to their OMS from the meter side.
OSGP (Open Smart Grid Protocol) probably the best solution right now in terms of client side implementation, whether thats going to be over Lora or Sigfox or NBIoT who knows...

 

[Koosvanwyk]

I posted some studies done on upgrading the existing Hydro in WC in the hydro power thread.

Costs are quite reasonable, surprising it hasn't been done already to be honest.

Linky - https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/hydro-electricity.1163260/post-28423626

Fairly obvious from the article, that this ISN'T what they're talking about though -

"What we will be looking at and where they may well play a role is when we move towards a more advanced load management control which means we will be able to do interventions and installations of a particular smart device to pass over control to the home owner to allow them to manage their electricity demand more efficiently and more smartly. So that is being assessed at present and should it be viable subject to a feasibility study, we're looking at the mechanics of how that would be rolled out."

Reading the not so subtext, what they're talking about is (mandated) demand side load reduction.
i.e. we don't have enough power, we're going to shut off your Geyser.

This would be best done with financial incentive really, i.e. Time of Use billing. The meter rollout for that is going nowhere fast though.

The first thing I did when I moved into my house was to disconnect the ripple control receiver, stupid device as it kept on shutting of my geyser whent the timer was turning it on.

 

[neoprema]