Wits and UJ researchers argue why solar power users in South Africa should pay higher grid connection fees.
[Editor’s note: Eskom has officially filed a tariff application with Nersa that includes
For South Africa’s coal-based society, this transition will have a major effect on peoples’ livelihoods and standards of living.The proposed connection fee is a good example of the principle. The fee is needed to cover the costs that electricity providers incur to build and maintain the capacity to generate and deliver additional energy when users’ private systems cannot provide enough.
Our view is that both grid connection fees and structured feed-in arrangements are necessary to ensure greater fairness in the social distribution of Eskom’s financial woes. that this is at best a misplaced priority which risks aggravating the country’s electricity problems. But it is also contributing to the confusion.The generation crisis is the most visible to ordinary citizens because it manifests in staged power cuts when Eskom cannot generate and distribute enough electricity to meet demand, especially at peak times.