R11,000 for a bi-directional meter and R350 per month to sell solar power to Cape Town

Jan

Jan

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How much it costs to sell power back to the grid

Residents of the City of Cape Town (CoCT) can sell excess electricity from their backup power system back to the grid, but it can be challenging and expensive.

However, Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the city is eyeing cheaper feed-in metres to help reduce the cost of selling power back to the grid
 
I'm defs waiting for the new meter pricing and to see if there will still be a monthly fee.

Also, afaik, households still only get paid credits up to their monthly power spend, they can't 'make money' from their solar. It is only businesses that can do that, but I'm happy to be proven wrong on that.

My best ROI still comes from increasing battery capacity
 
So you have to pay R350 a month for the convenience of putting back into the grid. at R1.04/kWh which is 336kWh or 11kWh per day I have to generate extra. With my medium sized setup of 8kW inverter and 8kW of panels I'm hardly going to break even and I'm also going be putting more of a load on my inverter which may cause it to fail earlier. I also have to recover the R6000 (or R12000) for a new meter.

Hardly seems worth the effort.

Fortunately I don't live in Cape Town so I don't even have to make the decision.
 
I wonder if you could buy a shitty warehouse in some derelict area, put PV on the roof and literally make money just selling power?
 
Tman* said:
Downsides:

1. Upfront meter fee
2. Monthly fee
3. Increased wear & tear on your own equipment
4. R1.24 kWh buying price is a joke.

You have to be on TIK to sell back into the grid.
Click to expand...

The early adopters pre-2021 (lower prices) that have large arrays exceeding 10kw will benefit from this, will take them about 1.5-2 years to break even assuming nothing changes.
 
Zerc said:
So you have to pay R350 a month for the convenience of putting back into the grid. at R1.04/kWh which is 336kWh or 11kWh per day I have to generate extra. With my medium sized setup of 8kW inverter and 8kW of panels I'm hardly going to break even and I'm also going be putting more of a load on my inverter which may cause it to fail earlier. I also have to recover the R6000 (or R12000) for a new meter.

Hardly seems worth the effort.

Fortunately I don't live in Cape Town so I don't even have to make the decision.
Click to expand...
It's worse. Your 8kW is limited to only supplying 3kW.
 
Wasn't there something about CoCT's budget proposal for next year lowering the monthly fee for "reading the meters" to something quite small like R10 or something?

I'd have considered selling back if the meter was like R2k. And a monthly fee no more than R10. Otherwise, no ways. My system (as it's currently looking) will only barely be big enough for my own needs for 9 months, and I'd need grid anyway in winter, so there's no profit to be had here.
 
newby_investor said:
Depending on the job, doing a proper estimate of work can actually be a lot of work in and of itself.
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True, especially if you have to attend to all the chancers who want to go "off grid" when they feel the pinch of loadshedding only to lose interest when things get better.
 
TheChamp said:
True, especially if you have to attend to all the chancers who want to go "off grid" when the fell the pinch of loadshedding only to lose interest when things get better.
Click to expand...
This is one of the reasons that some kinds of contractors charge a fee for estimating work.

If you're being responsible and getting multiple quotes for every major job that you want doing, then obviously not everyone who asks you for a quote is going to actually give you the work. So you've got to cover the costs for your work somehow.
 
Can you reduce your own grid costs - but not resell ?
ie metre stops at 0.00 ?
 
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