The long term view I forsee is that Eskom will no longer be able to sustain itself and that is a very scary scenario :-
The consumers who are wealthy enough to purchase their own power solutions will end up not using Eskom power or using way less. These same consumers are probably ones who actually pay their accounts therefore contributing to Eskom income.
The result will be that Eskom will lose this revenue stream and be saddled with a lower income stream. With non-paying consumers and a lower income stream Eskom will be forced to increase prices even more to cover costs.
The higher costs will force more and more people to look for alternative energy sources as electricty will be just too expensive in households where income is limited or very low. (Think of pensioners having to choose between food or electricity)
Also the amount of illegal connections will increase.
Again the revenue stream to Eskom will reduce even further and they would have to continue to increase prices.
The catch 22 situation is that the more expensive electricity becomes, the less people will use it, forcing further price increases to cover costs, and more people stealing it; and so the cycle will continue.
I will not be suprised when we get to a situation that gated communities start producing their own power, whether from solar or other methods. It might even get to a point where whole towns will look at alternatives to Eskom to generate their own power.
The only problem at the moment is batteries to store the energy for later use which I am confident will change as technology becomes more advanced.
I can imagine a scenario that each household would have a bank of batteries for their own use which would be charged via wind or solar and paying a monthly rental for the energy generating equipment to the equipment owner. So like financing a new car, consumers would be financing a energy solution. Imagine if one could get investors to create a specialised company to do this ?
If you can excuse the pun, Dark Days are ahead.
Will we get to this point? I hope not but whats the alternative ?
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