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When we buy electricity from the Knysna municipality we pay for the number of kilowatt hours we use and we also pay the municipality a daily charge for making the electricity available 24 hours a day.
That used to be a fair arrangement, but electricity is no longer available 24 hours a day. On Thursday this week, for instance, we had a six-hour interruption to the supply and that followed a two-hour interruption earlier in the day. Now Stage 6 means that 10 hours of load shedding per day has been scheduled until further notice.
The question arises: Should we pay for 24 hours of a service when only 16 hours has been delivered?
We would not go so far as to say that charging for a service that was not delivered is fraud, but we would not fight with someone who did see it as fraud. It is one of those arguments best settled in a court where both sides of the argument (if there is another side) can be considered.
In the meantime most of us have spent many thousands of rands on back-up equipment like torches, lamps, gas stoves, batteries, inverters and solar panels.
We believe that when a municipality imposes an availability charge for a 24-hour service it accepts the responsibility to provide a 24-hour service. It therefore seems to us that if electricity is available only two thirds of the time the availability charge should be reduced by one third.
We accept that ESKOM is responsible for the failure of the electricity supply, but we would argue that this was predictable and the path was opened for municipalities to buy electricity from alternate suppliers.
In fact, red tape was scrapped by President, Cyril Ramaphosa to improve access to renewable energy from suppliers of both solar and wind power. The City of Cape Town, has already called for tenders for a large solar project. It has also encouraged commercial and industrial firms to do so and one example is the Golden Arrow bus company which now produces a surplus of electricity from solar panels on the roofs of its bus sheds.
The economic case for roof-top solar is now so strong that there is no longer a valid argument against it. In fact, we find it shocking that the Knysna Municipality is not going out of its way to encourage companies and residents to use rooftop solar and to feed their surplus electricity into the grid.
The rule should be: “make electricity where you use it”. Why should we pay Eskom vast sums of money to burn coal in power stations a thousand miles away and then transmit the electricity along expensive power lines to the coast?
It is crazy and it is time to recognise this. Knysna is in an excellent position to prove the point. We have the sunshine and we have the roof space. The only thing holding us back is the limited imagination of our municipal minds.