Bankrupt South African municipality wants homes with solar power to pay extra fees
The embattled Emfuleni Local Municipality plans to introduce an application fee and a monthly levy for homes with solar power installations.
Located in the heart of the Vaal triangle in southern Gauteng, Emfuleni’s area of governance includes Vereeniging, Vanderbijlpark, Boipatong, Evaton, Sebokeng, and Sharpeville.
Earlier in June, Emfuleni’s municipal council approved an in-principle proposal that will require residents to pay a R2,400 application fee when they install a solar power system.
After registration, households must pay a monthly levy of R463 for generating their own electricity. FF Plus Gauteng deputy leader and Emfuleni councillor Gerda Senekal has criticised the plan.
“The FF Plus sees this levy and application fee as nothing but a desperate attempt by Emfuleni to generate revenue, seeing as it is failing to provide sustainable electricity to paying residents,” she said.
Senekal highlighted that the plan followed the municipality’s handing over of electricity distribution and revenue collection to Eskom in 2023.
Senekal said the forfeiture resulted from the municipality’s poor financial management. Emfuleni is among a plethora of municipalities formally classified as bankrupt.
Its liabilities exceed its income, and its annual budgets have been underfunded for several years. As of January 2026, Emfuleni’s historical Eskom bulk electricity debt stood at R7.74 billion.
Senekal said that residents will have an opportunity to oppose the application fee and levy during a public participation process, which is expected to open in the near future.
Senekal also said that voters should consider the development when casting their votes in the municipal elections on 4 November 2026.
Eskom and several other municipalities have also adopted or increased monthly fixed capacity charges to address a decline in energy sales in recent years.
The drops have been driven by a combination of factors, including high rates of illegal connections, poor electricity revenue collection, and increased self-generation.
Amid severe load-shedding, affluent and middle-income households have embraced solar power, reducing their purchases from state-run utilities.
Higher fixed fees punish solar power users
Application fees for residential solar power installation are becoming increasingly common among municipal utilities, forming part of their small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) registration policies.
The fees can vary significantly and are often intended to cover the costs of replacing the customer’s meter with a bidirectional meter to measure grid feed-in.
However, neither Eskom nor any municipality utility with SSEG policies explicitly imposes monthly fees on homes based on the presence of solar power alone.
Eskom requires that SSEG customers move to its Homeflex time-of-use (ToU) tariff, which has six different variable energy charges depending on the time of day and season that the power is used.
However, the fixed charges on this plan are identical to its Homepower fees, which apply to people who don’t have grid-tied or hybrid solar power systems.
The ToU’s energy tariffs are likely also favourable to many solar power users, as these systems are often paired with batteries, enabling them to shift demand.
That being said, Eskom’s exponential fixed fee increases over the last two years have resulted in substantially increased bills for low to moderate electricity users, which can include solar power users.
The City of Cape Town charges higher fixed charges on its ToU tariff plan, but the plan is optional for all residential households.
The city has also increased its fixed tariffs substantially in the last two years. However, its variable energy increases have been much lower than those of Eskom and other municipalities.
Johannesburg’s City Power implicitly punishes SSEG users by forcing them to move to a postpaid billing plan with much higher fixed tariffs than on prepaid.
A home on postpaid with a 60-amp (60A) connection pays about R1,070 per month before consuming any energy.
Homes with an 80A connection pay R1,360. That amount is set to increase to about R1,483 from 1 July 2026. Prepaid users currently pay R230 in fixed fees, which will rise to R241.50 from 1 July 2026.
The big gap between fixed fees for prepaid and postpaid users is one of the biggest reasons that residents in the city with solar power don’t want to register their systems.
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