The City of Cape Town recently announced plans to start paying consumers who feed electricity back into the grid. Previously, compensation had been restricted to credit on municipal accounts, but now the City will start paying cash once a customer’s municipal account has been cleared.

The DA in the Western Cape welcomes this innovation from the City in an attempt to free its residents from Eskom’s rolling blackouts.

This initiative will initially be aimed at commercial and industrial customers, as these users tend to have more surface area available for the installation of solar panels. The policy will be expanded to all electricity generating customers over time, even residents with small scale solar SV installations.

Small scale electricity generation (SSEG) is an underutilised source of energy that can quickly be brought online to help ease the electricity crisis. This stands in stark contrast to National Government’s over-regulated process through which commercial Independent Power Producers are registered and approved to produce and deliver power to the grid.

Yesterday, the DA launched its Energy and Electricity Policy which aims to do on a national scale what is already being done in the Western Cape and DA-run municipalities.

MPP Gillion Bosman says: “The DA has shown that where we govern, we are not content to simply accept the failures of Eskom to the detriment of our citizens. The DA in the Western Cape commends the City of Cape Town for continuously looking for new ways to keep the lights on and the economy moving, and doing it more successfully on the budget of a metro than the ANC government can manage with the entire national budget.”

 

Issued by Gillion Bosman, MPP - DA Western Cape Spokesperson on Finance, Economic Opportunities and Tourism