The hidden costs of Cape Town's bidirectional feed-in meters

[Jan]

Cape Town's hidden solar fees

Several Cape Town residents have accused the metro of concealing substantial additional installation costs for its bidirectional feed-in meters.

MyBroadband recently reported that the City of Cape Town's (CoCT's) new single-phase feed-in meter was seeing poor demand despite being substantially cheaper than the older three-phase meter.

 

[gotaway]

and ask the muni wekkas installing those 19 a month (1 a working day!) and they can barely keep up with the demand

 

[elf_lord_ZC5]

We need your help, but we are not going to help you.

Nice typical South African attitude.

SHEM!!

 

[Willie Trombone]

Cape Town's hidden solar fees

Several Cape Town residents have accused the metro of concealing substantial additional installation costs for its bidirectional feed-in meters.

MyBroadband recently reported that the City of Cape Town's (CoCT's) new single-phase feed-in meter was seeing poor demand despite being substantially cheaper than the older three-phase meter.

What about Eskom direct areas?
R10k quote to convert my account to home flex 4 tariff from home power. I already have the bidi meter.

No idea what the quote is actually for.

 

[ProfA]

Numpties trying to help government deserve what they get

 

[elf_lord_ZC5]

What about Eskom direct areas?
R10k quote to convert my account to home flex 4 tariff from home power. I already have the bidi meter.

No idea what the quote is actually for.

Niether do they, other than an opportunity to milk you for whatever fee they can dream of.

 

[Bad Ballie]

The normal from the DA then (hidden and ever increasing cost of living from the left wing), if you poor you are buggered, if you are more affluent you not going to fall for the feedback nonsense anyway and will be going off grid or are already off grid.

 

[Kico]

The logic of the COCT is highly questionable. The picture they paint in public is far from reality. The COCT should establish a public consultation forum where proper engagement on the matter can take place. Hopefully the COCT will reconsider their position before local government elections of 2026.

 

[CPTBoy]

Yeah, this irritated me so much when I applied. This extra hidden cost is not made very clear with a one liner on the contract that the cable / external box will need to be done as well.

When I requested more information regarding this, radio silence.

 

[elf_lord_ZC5]

The logic of the COCT is highly questionable. The picture they paint in public is far from reality. The COCT should establish a public consultation forum where proper engagement on the matter can take place. Hopefully the COCT will reconsider their position before local government elections of 2026.

Elections of 2026 - replace dumb with dumber, eish!

Good solution.

Love the South African attitude - we jump from one fire into the next. It does not ever occur to most, that killing the fire they in, and repairing the damage that has been done, as a viable solution. It means that they themselves will actually need to take responsibility for something, instead of expecting their fellow citizens to take responsibility on their behalf, and then expect them other okes, to fix it, for them.

 

[Unchained]

The initial document stated that the only cost is the price of the meter (+-R6043, so I think it was fair for me to assume that the current meter in my home will be replaced by the new one without any other work associated with it. After payment I received the document about the procedure to be followed and the requirement for the street facing enclosure for the meter. In my case the power cable enters my property in my driveway, making the positioning of this box very difficult.
With every step forward towards selling electricity back to the CoCT, there are more expenses for the person attempting this process.

 

[shogun]

I think the article raises valid points. My experience has been different however, and I'd imagine that there are a lot of users with positive experiences that have not been through these roadblocks. So while I fully get that the process needs to improve for those users... there are tons of users that will likely not experience that frustration. Anecdotal evidence from my experience: My AMI meter was installed about 10 days ago, so I've just been through this process. I completed the SSEG registration document online the day that my installation was complete. The next morning my permission to install was complete. I then completed the contract for the SSEG, and received an invoice for the AMI meter (the R6,043 one). I paid that. Once it cleared, I received a call from the COCT team that installed it. They put it in the street box, told me it was done. I asked the installer to set the feed in limit and start exporting and I was done. Flawless process to be honest and the guys from the COCT were very helpful.

The only issue I have (and I knew this before I installed the system) is that the limit of 25% means I can't push out all my power. I could push out about 3 times what I am pushing back now. I know there's probably a solid technical reason they are limiting it (and maybe they raise the limit later), but I'm still not clear on what that is. The way I see it, at the moment they could have more power and I could be earning more money. I'd happily pay for a wall box or change cable underground if they removed the export limit. I could make that money back pretty darn quickly.

I know there's a lot of negativity looking at the comments, so I just wanted to point out that there are clearly a lot of positive experiences.

My current generation at the moment... Once the battery is full, that generation is going to grind to a halt where it could be going to the grid on top of the amount I'm exporting at the moment.

 

[NL2005]

I think the article raises valid points. My experience has been different however, and I'd imagine that there are a lot of users with positive experiences that have not been through these roadblocks. So while I fully get that the process needs to improve for those users... there are tons of users that will likely not experience that frustration. Anecdotal evidence from my experience: My AMI meter was installed about 10 days ago, so I've just been through this process. I completed the SSEG registration document online the day that my installation was complete. The next morning my permission to install was complete. I then completed the contract for the SSEG, and received an invoice for the AMI meter (the R6,043 one). I paid that. Once it cleared, I received a call from the COCT team that installed it. They put it in the street box, told me it was done. I asked the installer to set the feed in limit and start exporting and I was done. Flawless process to be honest and the guys from the COCT were very helpful.

The only issue I have (and I knew this before I installed the system) is that the limit of 25% means I can't push out all my power. I could push out about 3 times what I am pushing back now. I know there's probably a solid technical reason they are limiting it (and maybe they raise the limit later), but I'm still not clear on what that is. The way I see it, at the moment they could have more power and I could be earning more money. I'd happily pay for a wall box or change cable underground if they removed the export limit. I could make that money back pretty darn quickly.

I know there's a lot of negativity looking at the comments, so I just wanted to point out that there are clearly a lot of positive experiences.

My current generation at the moment... Once the battery is full, that generation is going to grind to a halt where it could be going to the grid on top of the amount I'm exporting at the moment.

View attachment 1765312

Glad to hear that there are positive experiences as well. Their requirements document (which requires some searching to find it) clearly requires a new metering box on the street front property boundary so this raises the question as to why this is only required for some applicants and not for others. Your case also shows that the AMI meter can be installed in the existing municipal meter box in the street - to me this would be least disruptive and cheapest solution.

COCT would be well advised to explain the rationale for requiring new meter boxes and the 25% limit on exporting electricity back to the grid. If there are logical reasons for the policies (and they have to stick with these requirements) then they should state this clearly in all their communication and help pages on selling back electricity. This will prevent people (like myself) from feeling misled and everyone will be able to do payback calculations accurately when considering electricity export

 

[shogun]

Glad to hear that there are positive experiences as well. Their requirements document (which requires some searching to find it) clearly requires a new metering box on the street front property boundary so this raises the question as to why this is only required for some applicants and not for others. Your case also shows that the AMI meter can be installed in the existing municipal meter box in the street - to me this would be least disruptive and cheapest solution.

COCT would be well advised to explain the rationale for requiring new meter boxes and the 25% limit on exporting electricity back to the grid. If there are logical reasons for the policies (and they have to stick with these requirements) then they should state this clearly in all their communication and help pages on selling back electricity. This will prevent people (like myself) from feeling misled and everyone will be able to do payback calculations accurately when considering electricity export

I had the same feeling, so I reached out last week. I got a really interesting response from someone in their Service Connection Planning department that I think is a pretty solid response around the 25% limit:

Hi <Redacted>

This is actually such a highly technical and complex matter that one could write a masters or even a PHD thesis on it. However, I will try to provide a brief and simple explanation:

1. Transmission and distribution transformers are designed for power flow from high to low voltage. They can only cope with a limited amount of reverse power flow (exactly how much depends on each transformer design – thus nobody, globally, can provide a definitive answer) before overheating results in premature aging or catastrophic failure. Replacing all of the City’s transformers with units designed to cater for 100% capacity in both directions (these are difficult to design and costly to manufacture) would cost in excess of R 20 Billion.

2. LV reticulation networks are designed to cater for loads and to ensure that at peak load the clients will all receive power within the national parameters, particularly the voltage being 230V +- 10%. For residential areas this peak load occurs on winter evenings, when SSEG does not contribute anything, and the system is designed to ensure that network volt-drop does not result in the customer furthest from a substation experiencing a supply voltage below 207V. During summer days, when the load is low, energy export to the grid would cause the voltage to rise and if too much power is exported the voltage could exceed 253V resulting in damage to appliances.

3. A national working group, taking cognisance of international practices and problems into consideration, developed a document called NRS-097. This national standard is applicable to all aspects of SSEG and includes the 25% of NMD export limit for clients connected to shared infrastructure.

4. In order to cope with the volume of SSEG installations we have established a streamlined on-line and semi-automated application process such that we only need to spend 1 to 2 man-hours on each of the smaller SSEG applications. That 25% export limit avoids having to do a grid hosting capacity and power-flow study (which takes approximately 100 man-hours) for each application in order to avoid grid voltage instability and excessive reverse power flow across distribution and transmission transformers, at least until such time that specific areas have received a high SSEG penetration, which we can see on our GIS SSEG Record map.

5. Those limits also serve the purpose of avoiding situations that compel us to forbid export of energy to the grid by the latest applicants in an electricity network segment because earlier applicants had been granted permission for high power export quantities.

6. Several countries, despite having imposed policies and restrictions similar to ours, are in locations of high SSEG installation volumes experiencing electricity infrastructure problems caused by power export to the grid that they had to implement further restrictions or actively control client’s SSEG system performance.



In view of the above, that 25% of NMD export limit will not be lifted in the foreseeable future.

Now the conversation could be had that API integration of inverters with the COCT to more dynamically adjust inverter limits for feeding back... but in the absence of this, I think it was a really great reply, and is a fairly common sense approach

 

[elf_lord_ZC5]

I had the same feeling, so I reached out last week. I got a really interesting response from someone in their Service Connection Planning department that I think is a pretty solid response around the 25% limit:


Now the conversation could be had that API integration of inverters with the COCT to more dynamically adjust inverter limits for feeding back... but in the absence of this, I think it was a really great reply, and is a fairly common sense approach

Now that is the type of reply, I appreciate.

 

[Johnatan56]

I think the article raises valid points. My experience has been different however, and I'd imagine that there are a lot of users with positive experiences that have not been through these roadblocks. So while I fully get that the process needs to improve for those users... there are tons of users that will likely not experience that frustration. Anecdotal evidence from my experience: My AMI meter was installed about 10 days ago, so I've just been through this process. I completed the SSEG registration document online the day that my installation was complete. The next morning my permission to install was complete. I then completed the contract for the SSEG, and received an invoice for the AMI meter (the R6,043 one). I paid that. Once it cleared, I received a call from the COCT team that installed it. They put it in the street box, told me it was done. I asked the installer to set the feed in limit and start exporting and I was done. Flawless process to be honest and the guys from the COCT were very helpful.

The only issue I have (and I knew this before I installed the system) is that the limit of 25% means I can't push out all my power. I could push out about 3 times what I am pushing back now. I know there's probably a solid technical reason they are limiting it (and maybe they raise the limit later), but I'm still not clear on what that is. The way I see it, at the moment they could have more power and I could be earning more money. I'd happily pay for a wall box or change cable underground if they removed the export limit. I could make that money back pretty darn quickly.

I know there's a lot of negativity looking at the comments, so I just wanted to point out that there are clearly a lot of positive experiences.

My current generation at the moment... Once the battery is full, that generation is going to grind to a halt where it could be going to the grid on top of the amount I'm exporting at the moment.

View attachment 1765312

One of the issues is that most are not producing 12kW, financially it can make sense for you, but most free standing houses are going to be 2-4kW panels, and there it doesn't make sense.

Thanks for your city reply, interesting, guessing they are referring to e.g. South Australia.
There they implemented a requirement for a backstop system: https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/victorias-emergency-backstop-mechanism-for-solar

Note that this applies to 200kW or more, don't think you're really going to have issues with 2-5kW systems. This should rather be a cap regarding how much power is pushed than it being a percentage (and you can apply for higher, then force backstop for example), since most connections are definitely not being used at their max regarding the infrastructure. This seems more like a revenue thing.

 

[NL2005]

I had the same feeling, so I reached out last week. I got a really interesting response from someone in their Service Connection Planning department that I think is a pretty solid response around the 25% limit:


Now the conversation could be had that API integration of inverters with the COCT to more dynamically adjust inverter limits for feeding back... but in the absence of this, I think it was a really great reply, and is a fairly common sense approach

Thanks for posting the city's reply - agreed, great to see a proper explanation (whether or not it's a lazy approach is probably a valid question). Now they just need to be more transparent about this (and the metering box requirement) upfront.

 

[shogun]

Thanks for posting the city's reply - agreed, great to see a proper explanation (whether or not it's a lazy approach is probably a valid question). Now they just need to be more transparent about this (and the metering box requirement) upfront.

I think the metering box in my case *might* be because my house is not yet on pre-paid... it's still post-paid, so if I switch, I expect I may need to go through the same procedure.

 

[NL2005]

I think the metering box in my case *might* be because my house is not yet on pre-paid... it's still post-paid, so if I switch, I expect I may need to go through the same procedure.

Mine is also post paid, so wouldn't explain the need for the new metering box

 

[shogun]

One of the issues is that most are not producing 12kW, financially it can make sense for you, but most free standing houses are going to be 2-4kW panels, and there it doesn't make sense.

Thanks for your city reply, interesting, guessing they are referring to e.g. South Australia.
There they implemented a requirement for a backstop system: https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/victorias-emergency-backstop-mechanism-for-solar

Note that this applies to 200kW or more, don't think you're really going to have issues with 2-5kW systems. This should rather be a cap regarding how much power is pushed than it being a percentage (and you can apply for higher, then force backstop for example), since most connections are definitely not being used at their max regarding the infrastructure. This seems more like a revenue thing.

Yeah I hear you. I have decided that I want to be completely independent if needed, and leave space for the electric car etc going forward. I expect with the rate at which prices are dropping, we're going to see the average system size increase dramatically. I tracked components for a year before I installed, and in 12 months, the system cost (excluding installation) dropped a ton. By way of example, the cheapest 14.2kWh batteries I could find in July 2023 were SolarMD @ R85K. Today you can get a Volta Stage 4 for R41K incl VAT. The 555W jinko panels I found then were R2300 per panel, and are now R1540.

Since installing 2 months ago, the battery I bought (Volta Stage 4) has come down another R3K and the Sunsynk inverter came down R6K... That's R9K down on that system in 2 months...

Bang for buck is increasing rapidly... and I expect feed in will track this as those installs come online.