Cape Town’s crazy new plan to limit load shedding
The City of Cape Town has issued a new tender to establish ‘third party aggregators’ to reward residents and businesses who allow their power to be turned off voluntarily to reduce consumption.
The system will see customers being rewarded for voluntarily reducing their power usage at certain times when the city’s power generation is constrained.
Using this system, the city would ask for a reduction in usage to try and prevent a blackout for people who rely on its power.
A third-party aggregator would then switch off power to people who signed up for it its program, and such people are then subsequently rewarded.
According to the city, when usage needs to be cut, the aggregators would switch off agreed-to non-essential electrical equipment that certain Capetonians said they could – this could be done remotely via installed smart devices.
The incentives and rewards offered by the aggregators are to be determined by them, said the city. It hopes to save at least 60MW using this system.
“At the heart of this new intervention is the conviction that small actions can lead to big impacts,” said Cape Town’s mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.
“These ‘Power Heroes’ – those who chose to have their power cut – will help the city to protect customers from the higher stages of Eskom’s load-shedding in particular.”
The Eskom situation is so precarious that a combination of interventions will be key over the next decade as work continues to reduce our reliance on Eskom, said Hill-Lewis. Smaller energy consumers can make a big difference in keeping the lights on for longer in Cape Town and ensuring that the Cape Town economy is enhanced and protected as much as possible.
Other initiatives
To combat load shedding, the City of Cape Town has planned and taken major leaps to become independent from the national power utility.
The new tender forms only part of various mitigation plans. According to the mayor, the City has already successfully deployed the use of our Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme to protect City customers from up to two stages of load-shedding where possible.
“We have decided that we cannot sit around and wait for Eskom and the national government to do what needs to be done to end the load-shedding that is destroying our economy. I have written to the President explaining ten ways that the problem could be fixed with the help of municipalities such as Cape Town but have not been met with any willingness in this regard.”
The mother city is also looking at a tender that was advertised earlier this year which will enable the City to procure 200MW from Independent Power Producers (IPPs). On top of that, it has also issued a tender for the engineering, procurement and construction of a solar power plant in Atlantis, with more planned across the metro.
The City has allocated R15 million in this financial year to pay for energy generated by small-scale embedded generators through the feed-in tariff of 75,51 c/kWh (excluding VAT) and the 25c/kWh incentive offered for small-scale embedded generators.
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