Cape Town residents can now turn sunshine into hard cash
Cape Town residential households can now earn cash for power from their solar PV generation systems.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis on Monday announced that a first round of applications is open until March 8 for households to earn cash from selling their excess solar power to the City, beyond the existing automatic crediting of municipal bills.
Hill-Lewis was speaking at the launch of the City’s Energy Strategy at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
The plan sets out a roadmap to 2050, including short-term plans to protect against the first four stages of Eskom load-shedding by 2026.
“In the short-term, we are planning for four stages of load-shedding protection by 2026, as we make the great transition from unreliable, costly and fossil fuel based Eskom energy, to an increasingly decentralised supply of reliable, cost-effective, carbon neutral energy from a diverse range of suppliers.
“Residents and businesses are going to play a crucial role in helping us to end load-shedding by working together.
“We will buy as much solar power as households and businesses can sell to us under the Cash for Power programme.
“Households can also volunteer for our Power Heroes programme to remotely switch off geysers at peak times in a bid to avoid a full stage of load-shedding.
“And in another first, we are enabling businesses to sell power to each other and wheel it across the grid, which will add 350MW of decentralised power to Cape Town’s grid in time,” said Hill-Lewis.
According to the City, short-term load-shedding mitigation up to 2026 will be achieved largely through a mix of Steenbras Hydro Plant (1 – 2 stages); 500MW of dispatchable energy (up to four stages from 06:00 – 22:00 daily where possible); and demand management programmes such as Power Heroes and Large Power Users (LPUs) curtailment.
Overall, Cape Town is planning to add up to one gigawatt of independent power supply to end load-shedding in the city over time, with the first 650MW of this within five years.
Cash for Power applications are open for all residential customers on the home user tariff with an approved grid-tied SSEG system and bi-directional AMI meter to feed power back into the grid.
For more information, visit: https:// www.capetown.gov.za/City-Connect/
Apply/Municipal-services/Electricity/ apply-to-sell-surplus-sseg-energy-to-the-city
Interested parties are required to first be registered as a service provider on both the City Supplier Database and the National Treasury Web Based Central Supplier Database (CSD).
Cash for Power applications for this round should be submitted to hoosain. essop@capetown.gov.za by March 8.
Any submissions received after this date will be kept for the next round. The date will to be announced after this first round closes.
As per Supply Chain rules, successful Cash for Power sellers will contract with the City for a period of three years after appointment.
Cape Times