City preventing mayor's power dream from becoming reality. David Lipschitz letter to the Cape Times published Wed 20 Apr 2016

At the City of Cape Town Energy Efficiency Quarterly Forum on Wednesday. March 16, Mayor Patricia de Lille said her dream was that every house should be a power station generating electricity for the grid. And another part of her dream is that Tesla and other electric vehicle suppliers come to town and we have electric cars and electric busses for the MyCiti system.

This is a dream I also have.

But the city is doing everything it can to prevent the mayor and my dream from becoming a reality.

Why? Because the city is scared of losing electricity revenue.

So they are sitting on their hands fiddling with electricity tariffs and service fees while their customers go elsewhere.

Some of these customers are talking about going "off grid", i.e. separating themselves from the grid. We heard at the forum that this will be economically viable within five years, using solar panels, batteries and inverters.

But the mayor's and my dream is that houses should be power stations. In order for this to happen, houses must remain connected to the grid. And for this to happen, the people who could have gone off grid will need to be incentivised to stay on the grid.

The first incentive: no service fee. At the moment, the city is instituting service or connection fees for all its clients. See the new "home user" tariff in the City's draft tariff announcement. Their reasoning is that people will need the grid from time to time to charge their batteries or to run high power loads, and that this grid infrastructure needs to be maintained.

What the city has forgotten is that it too needs electricity for its buildings, for its infrastructure, for its business clients, and soon for its electric buses. And in a few years' time for its new pumped storage systems that it will build as part of its rollout of new dams to prevent water shortages in future. These pumped storage systems are massive and efficient batteries. The City will need the cheap electricity generated by rooftop electric systems during the day to pump water from the lower dam to the higher dam and it can then sell this electricity at night or on rainy days to its users at higher prices.

Additionally surplus electricity generated during the day can be used for desalination, thus averting our water crisis and at the same time providing water for the dams.

And whist Eskom say that there will be a surplus of electricity in five years' time, who knows what it will cost. There is a massive shortage of electricity at the moment, and in five years' time thousands, or perhaps millions, of homeowners and business owners will have "defected" from the electricity grid and will be producing their own electricity for their own consumption, and will have physically disconnected themselves from the grid in order not to pay the service fees.

At the same time as this, with solar-electric prices coming down every year, within five years, solar-electric electricity will be cheaper than Eskom's selling prices to the municipalities.

Wouldn't the City rather buy cheaper, clean electricity from its own inhabitants than buy expensive, dirty electricity from Eskom?

Wouldn't it be much better to allow a free connection, but to tell home-based power stations that they must supply the grid when there is a shortage of electricity, i.e. when electricity is expensive and buy from the grid when electricity is cheap?

This is entirely feasible with modern Smart Meters, Time of Use Tariffs, Net Metering, Demand Response and existing battery technology.

[left out in the newspaper:

Net Metering means that one buys and sells electricity at the same price. I would recommend that CNEM be introduced, i.e. City of Cape Town Net Metering. In CNEM, electricity sold to the grid by home owners and other "embedded generators" is sold at 80 percent of the current buying price.

Time of Use Tariffs means that the tariff changes depending on demand and supply. And Smart Meters means that the City will know exactly how much homeowners are producing, how much they are capable of exporting to the grid, and how much they are buying or selling from or to the grid at any particular time.

Demand response means that the City can disconnect or reduce its local electricity users electricity consumption with short notice, that saving on expensive electricity from Eskom, and at the same time making the local Western Cape grid more reliable, resilient, and it's electricity cheaper than elsewhere in the world.]

The mayor and my dream can become a reality. But it needs the mayor and her committee to talk to their citizens instead of producing reports which tell the world how fantastic they are, whilst they ignore their citizens, and whilst they ignore their future.

[Also left out in the newspaper:

There is a lot of research in strategic circles of over-reliance on experts, and under-reliance on grassroots research and citizen scientists' knowledge. Experts want the status quo to stay as it is - then they can keep their jobs!! But it is time for the City to act on this research!

And once everyone is a power station, then everyone will be contributing to a healthy environment where everyone has jobs and the city remains the world's best, cleanest and healthiest city in which to live.]

Life or Death Matter. David Lipschitz letter to the Cape Times published Tue 8 Mar 2016

According to the City of Cape Town web site, dam levels are at 38.7 percent and last week they were at 40.5 percent. In 2014 they were at 81.2 percent. Theoretically Cape Town has 21 months of water left, assuming no rain, but with dams silting up, who knows how much water we really have?

See http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/water/pages/weeklydamlevels.aspx

Cape Town's dramatic population increase over the past 20 years, together with hardly any increase in dams, combined with the drought over the past two years, and lack of imagination in the City of Cape Town council and at provincial level, had led to the problem.

Some people are calling for "Level 3" water savings. If the City implements Level 3 water savings, there will be an even more dramatic reduction in income for the City.

Many people have already installed pool covers and with a reduction in watering allowances on gardens, people are seeing a 50 percent-plus drop in water consumption, with an associated decrease in income going to the City, even with the massive price increases for large, home based water users.

At Level 3, people might find ways to stop buying City water altogether! People and organisations are already finding ways not to buy electricity due to the massive price increases, together with less Eskom and municipality electricity being available. Cape Town's lack of water is a big problem, made much worse by decades of bad planning, and bad thinking! Desalination could solve our problem, but government isn't thinking about that - yet.

If people were allowed to install rooftop solar electric systems on their houses, and if we were allowed to feed our excess electricity into the grid at a reasonable price, the excess electricity could be used to desalinate water. This is much cheaper than building new dams, and dams take years to build and need rain and mountain water - and we just don't have this time, nor, with climate change, can we expect the needed rain to materialise anytime soon.

If the City runs out of water, we'll all be dead within four days, so perhaps allowing rooftop electricity is truly the answer to many of our problems! Many people have planned their retirement, but isn't it better to plan to be alive next week?

Ratepayers ignored in City's Grand Centralisation Scheme. David Lipschitz letter to the Cape Times published Tue 29 Dec 2015

I live in the City of Cape Town, so I will use the City of Cape Town as my example, but I believe this example to be applicable in Johannesburg and other parts of South Africa.

The City, which works for its corporate citizens, providing them with a "red tape to red carpet" special service, that us mere mortals can only dream of, is implementing a massive growth strategy to increase square meters of office, conference, hotel and private living space in the Central Business District (CBD) and close to it. This makes the land in the CBD much more valuable, making billions for the property developers and hundreds of millions in additional rates annually for the city.

People are forced to travel into the city where in the rest of the world cities are moving to decentralised "pod" offices as Shelley Childs wrote about in your newspaper recently.

At the same time, it has managed to change the signalling of the traffic lights near the harbour to such an extent that traffic now goes back many kilometers when the traffic should be free flowing.

This is also applicable in Claremont with its three traffic lights on the M3, which are completely out of phase, and in many cases after the third set of lights there is no traffic, whereas before the lights there is a long queue.

And this is applicable on Strand Street, where I can remember only a few years ago being able to drive the length of Strand Street with green lights all the way. Nowadays, invariably every light is red!

At the same time as this the City has built its Integrated Rapid Transport ​(IRT) ​system, and in many cases the City has taken space from its citizens to build this transport system. Yellow lanes have been used for a third lane.

Many intersections that used to take two minutes to traverse now take upwards of six minutes to traverse because buses get priority, even if there are no busses when one gets to the intersections.

And then along these routes, the City has prevented the alternative bus and taxi services from operating, ​thus​ "forcing" people to choose, either a car, or a bus.

So we have a special recipe that the City has developed:

1) Grow rates income as fast as possible in the CBD, even going so far as to ignore the Spatial Planning, Environment and Land Use Committee, its own planning body, and even riding roughshod over historical landmarks in its own interest of centralising everything.

2) Creating traffic mayhem by stopping proper traffic light signalling and taking one third of the roadway for itself.

3) Creating its own special bus service, called the IRT.

4) Stopping alternative operators from using these routes. (Note: research I've done in July 2016 leads me to think that this is Apartheid planning gone mad).

5) Forcing people to choose between using their car or using the IRT.

6) And then finally, the nail in the coffin, adding e-tolls, which the IRT operators, owned by the city, won't need to pay. There will be other exceptions, for example minibus taxis and others, and 20 percent of the road users will pay 100 percent of the e-tolls.

The law abiding citizen is being given a choice. Either use "our" bus to come into "our" city where there is work, or be forced to pay an exorbitant amount to use your car and ​"​we​"​ won't give you any alternatives. If the city wants me to get out of my car, then the very least it needs is competition along its IRT routes, for example the IRT, Golden Arrow and other bus services, minibus taxis, normal taxis, Uber taxis or anything else. Only with this choice will I be able to get out of my car.

And lastly, in every other city in the world, e-tolls only work because there are alternatives. If South African cities wish to pursue their e-toll frenzy, then I suggest that​ the City​ builds a double-decker highway where the top​ deck is free. I believe e-tolls are illegal because the City is working for itself, even though I and millions of others are paying high rates, high electricity, water, sewerage and other costs, and I am being ignored while this City pursues its own grand centralisation scheme.

David Lipschitz
Greater Cape Town Civic Alliance Exco Member, Milnerton