Letter in Cape Times 22nd January 2016: Follow Strategy

Follow Strategy

The Nersa hearings and Eskom's 17 percent price increase request refer.

The reason for Eskom's customers not buying its product, electricity, is because Eskom have told their customers not to buy its product.

The price is too high and it isn't available.

One might think that load shedding isn't happening, but Eskom has 30GW and should already have 50GW, according to their own forecasts.

If South Africa was like the rest of the world, then South Africa would have 160GW by now. Electricity growth worldwide is 4 percent per annum and South Africa had 40GW 20 years ago.

Eskom made "profits" (actually prepayments from its customers to ensure service delivery in the future, which should have got us 50GW by now) in the past and paid massive bonuses. Now it's time for it to tell its employees to pay in, just like the rest of us have to when the going gets tough.

And giving Eskom R8 billion for diesel is like paying them because of the mistakes it has made - rewarding failure! The way to solve this problem is to implement the contents of the Energy White Paper of 1998 and the Renewable Energy White Paper of 2003. White Papers are the basis of government's strategy. If our government followed their own strategy, South Africa wouldn't be in this mess.

TOU and DR for homeowners!!

It's time for Time of Use Tariffs and Demand Response for Homeowners.

Let homeowners decide for themselves if they want to pay more for electricity at peak times and or have load shedding or part load shedding.

And please don't let Eskom say its impossible. I lived in the UK from 1987 till 1995 and we already had Time of Use Tariffs in the UK back then on meters where we paid our accounts in arrears.

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/eskoms-molefe-comes-out-swinging-on-final-day-of-nersa-hearings-2015-06-24/rep_id:3182

Oh, and its about time that homeowners understand these abbreviations:

• TOU: Time of Use Tariffs: paying different rates for electricity at different times of the day
• DR: Demand Response: switching off particular circuits such as cooking, geysers, air conditioning, under floor heating, swimming pool pumps, etc, which don't affect all the things we need to keep running in our houses. And if you are cooking a cake and you don't want the oven to switch off, you press a button and the oven stays on and you just pay a higher rate until your cake is cooked.