Cape Town sets Solar Power Record
The City of Cape Town received its highest monthly photovoltaic solar (PV) installation applications during February 2023.
Residents and businesses submitted 1,040 solar PV applications to the city in 2023, 440 in January, and 600 in February.
These two months alone accounted for 11% of all solar PV applications the city has processed since it began keeping records of applications in 2018.
The sharp increase comes shortly after the city announced a cash-for-power scheme allowing residents and businesses to sell electricity back to the grid at 78.98c/kWh in the next financial year.
The metro will pay a further 25c/kWh on top of this to encourage more consumers to self-generate and sell excess electricity to the metro.
“This is encouraging progress towards more and more businesses and residents helping us to end load-shedding over time by selling their excess power for cash,” said Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.
“This is exactly the market response we were hoping for by making recent policy changes to end the net consumption requirement so that we can pay actual cash for power instead of just crediting municipal bills.”
Out of 9,700 applications that the city has received since 2018, 5,078 projects have been commissioned.
The graph below shows the number of solar installation applications the City of Cape Town received every month from the start of 2020.
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Cape Town announces cash for power system
Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has announced the city can now pay cash for power fed into the local electricity grid.
The system will launch to businesses and become available to Cape Town residents in time. Participants will receive cash for selling their excess power into Cape Town’s grid.
This comes after National Treasury exempted Cape Town from competitive bidding processes, which the city said was not designed for “the coming energy revolution.”
Cape Town aims to give residents four stages of load-shedding protection within three years.
The sale of excess power by homes and businesses with the small-scale embedded generation, among other generation systems, will contribute to this goal.
“Payments to commercial customers will be possible before June, and within the year for any Capetonian with the necessary City-approved generation capacity,” Hill-Lewis said.
“If you’re thinking of investing in a solar system, it just got more attractive.”
He said it aims to buy electricity from as many city-supplied customers as are willing to sell.
“These customers may now produce as much power as they can from their approved systems and feed it into Cape Town’s grid,” stated Hill-Lewis.
“Under this plan, we will also pay these customers an incentive over and above the Nersa-approved tariff as they help us turn the corner on load-shedding.”
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) has approved a rate of 78.98c/kWh for this financial year.
Cape Town will add a 25c/kWh incentive tariff on top of this.
Hill-Lewis said the city has steadily laid the groundwork to enable payment for excess small-scale power, including a wheeling trial for commercial and industrial users.
The trial is helping to iron out technical and billing issues ahead of the mass-scale rollout.
Small-scale embedded generation and wheeling customers who want to feed energy into the grid need to have their system approved and have an AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) meter installed by the city.
“This is a bi-directional meter that allows accurate reporting of the amounts of energy consumed and generated,” the city said.
“We know this meter is still too costly for many, and we are working on finding an alternative option of comparable quality and reliability.”
Customers who want to upgrade their systems must have it approved by the city.
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