{"id":817992,"date":"2025-03-25T09:12:56","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T07:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=817992"},"modified":"2025-03-25T09:15:41","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T07:15:41","slug":"pain-coming-for-south-african-households-next-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/energy\/817992\/pain-coming-for-south-african-households-next-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Pain coming for South African households next week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

South African households need to prepare themselves for higher electricity prices starting on 1 April, as Eskom’s new tariff increases and tariff structures kick into effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will see Eskom direct customers pay an average of 12.7% more for electricity in the new month, along with additional fixed services charges slapped onto bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Municipal customers will have their pain delayed by a couple of months, with new municipal pricing kicking in from 1 July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Energy expert and managing director of EE Business Intelligence Chris Yelland has warned that some residential customers will experience a much higher increase than the 12.74% average electricity price increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, some customers will experience reductions in their monthly electricity spend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is because of the new tariff structure, which adjusts the previous cross-subsidies between large and small customers, rural and urban customers and rich and poor customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The restructuring slaps new fixed charges onto bills and implements new time-of-use charges for peak hours in summer and winter and gets rid of the subsidised incline block tariff. All on top of the price hikes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eskom has three main suites of residential tariffs, namely Homelight, Homepower and Homeflex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homelight (Homelight 20A and Homelight 60A) is intended for low-income residential customer and Homepower (1 through 4) targets middle- to high-income residential customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homeflex (1 through 4) represents the flexible time-of-use package, also targeting middle- and high-income households.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yelland conducted an in-depth analysis of the changes and found that the restructured pricing and tariffs negatively impact lower-income households more than higher-income households.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is generally because higher-end users have more options available to them to avoid charges\u2014such as Homeflex users who can adapt their appliance use to shift the load and take advantage of different off-peak periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such measures are typically not available to poorer households, who are stuck with more direct increases with little room to manoeuvre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The expert outlined the general increases customers can expect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Homelight<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Homelight customers with low consumption of 350 kWh and less per month face increases of 13.57%, which is above the average Eskom increase of 12.74%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Customers on the Homelight 20A tariff using more than 350 kWh per month experience progressively
lower increases than the average Eskom increase of 12.74%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is result of Eskom eliminating the highly subsidised component of the inclined block tariff for monthly consumption of less than 350 kWh per month in favour of a higher flat-rate energy tariff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indigent customers on the Homelight 20A are supposed to receive 50 kWh of free basic electricity per month, which should offset the 13.57% electricity price hike\u2014however, Yelland noted that more than 80% of indigent households in South Africa are not on the relevant municipal indigent registers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Therefore the significant majority of indigent households do not, in fact, receive any free basic electricity from Eskom or their local municipality,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same trend surfaces with the Homelight 60A tariff, where lower-end users face tariff hikes of 18.26%, instead of 12.74%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Homepower<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For the Homepower (Homepower 4) tariff, customers with a consumption of 750 kWh and less per month face massive cost increases significantly higher than the average Eskom increase of 12.74%, Yelland noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Customers on the Homepower 4 tariff using 800 kWh and more per month will experience significantly lower cost increases than the average Eskom increase of 12.74%, while customers using 1100 kWh and more per month will experience significant cost reductions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is also a result of eliminating the inclined block tariff of Homepower 4 in favour of a flat-rate energy component, with a 31.9% reduction in the variable energy rate for consumption above 600 kWh, and a corresponding massive increase of 88% in the fixed monthly component of the Homepower 4 tariff from R192.90 per month to R362.70 per month\u2014which impacts low consumption customers the hardest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Homeflex<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Yelland noted that it is not possible to determine the cost increase for various monthly energy consumptions for Homeflex, based on the new tariff rates for 2025\/26.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is because the actual cost increase\/decrease will depend not only on the monthly energy consumption of the customer, but also on the customer\u2019s load profile and response to time-of-use pricing signals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, there are massive price increases in the Homeflex 4 summer and winter peak, standard and off-peak energy rates, as well as in the fixed monthly components of the tariff, which will come into effect on 1 April 2025, so customers will be hit hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yelland added that there is a significant 60.8% reduction in ‘other variable charges’ (i.e. auxiliary, legacy and network charges), but these form a relatively low portion of the total variable charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South African households need to prepare themselves for higher electricity prices starting on 1 April, as Eskom’s new tariff increases and tariff structures kick into effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":742431,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9874],"tags":[5504,22109,20841,1164],"class_list":["post-817992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","tag-chris-yelland","tag-ee-publishing","tag-electricity-prices","tag-eskom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818013,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817992\/revisions\/818013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}