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.

These city-approved meters need to be installed by households and businesses who want to feed in their electricity as part of the metro’s small-scale embedded generator (SSEG) programme.

MyBroadband learned of surprisingly low demand for the new meters after contractors who had installed the older meters complained they could not supply eager customers with the cheaper meters.

They were initially under the impression that the city did not have stock of the meters.

However, it was subsequently established the city was not yet subcontracting private installers for single-phase installations because applications were so low that it could be handled by the city’s own teams.

Following the publication of our article, several Cape Town residents raised the potential reason for the poor uptake — high “metering accommodation” costs.

These costs are only shared with residents after they apply for the meter. They are found in a CoCT “Requirements for Small-Scale Embedded Generation” document detailing the application and approval process for SSEG installations.

A section titled “Metering and meter accommodation” explains that customers who are going to export and participate in the SSEG feed-in programme would have to provide a meter box at their own cost on the street-front property boundary.

“Such a meter box must face outwards and be locked with a standard city lock,” the document explains.

The metering box houses the meter and must be connected to the distribution box.

In addition, customers with an existing street-front overhead supply cable must have it replaced with an underground cable — also at their own cost.

One MyBroadband reader said that two solar installers had given him estimates between R10,000 and R15,000 to install this infrastructure.

They explained some of the work included the lifting of his pavement from his garage to his boundary wall and drilling a hole through the boundary wall to connect the cable with the box.

That is on top of the R6,043 for the meter itself, which the CoCT has told the public includes the cost of installation.

“I was already on the fence with the R6,043 for the meter, but now I am looking at R16,000 to R21,000 all-in cost,” he said.

The reader was also frustrated that the CoCT and installers had not explained why the new meter could not be installed in the existing municipal metering box on the street.

“The city says they want to establish a smart grid, but if they require a new meter box for every house that wants to sell back electricity to the city, their plans are stillborn,” he said.

“The metering accommodation is a dealbreaker for selling electricity back to them.”

“The costs are prohibitive, and I do not believe anyone — except in exceptional circumstances — will sign up for this.

Another MyBroadband reader complained that they were quoted R30,000 for their metering accommodation.

The amount is likely to vary greatly depending on installer, the distance between a home’s DB and the perimeter, and the amount of work needed for digging to lay cabling between the two points.

MyBroadband asked the City of Cape Town for feedback regarding the additional installation costs, but it had not provided a comment by the time of publication.

Cape Town ahead of the rest — but still not ideal

Cape Town’s feed-in programme is largely regarded to be the most progressive in South Africa.

It is the only authority that pays users back in cash if the value of their feed-in exceeds consumption, property taxes, and other municipal charges.

Cape Town said it had paid back R30.8 million in municipal bill credits and cash to households and businesses by 1 April 2024.

The single-phase R6,043 meter is substantially cheaper than the three-phase meter, which was previously well over R10,000.

However, the discount from the previous price becomes negligible when considering the total cost, including metering accommodation.

Another issue with the SSEG scheme some might have missed is that the city limits electricity export to the grid to 25% of the feed-in customer’s circuit breaker.

In a single-phase home with a typical 60A breaker, that works out to about 3.45kW, equivalent to the output of six or seven solar panels.

These factors could help explain why the city has only installed 19 meters per month since the new meter was launched in May 2024, substantially lower than the 38 monthly average over the previous two years.

In its last feedback in early October 2024, Cape Town said that 1,007 households and 750 businesses were contributing to the feed-in programme.