Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has invited businesses, factories, and warehouses, with large solar-power facilities to join the City’s initiative to bring loadshedding to an end.

He this week announced that the City would now embark on a two-step initiative to further boost the City’s electricity supply.

This would include compensating Independent Power Producers for the electricity they supply to the municipality while these IPPs would also be encouraged to become net producers of electricity.

Hill-Lewis says plans are to expand this initiative to residential households in the near future.

The Mayor says this initiative will also, hopefully, see residents in the long run, pay less for the electricity.

He says solar-generated power will cost residents a lot less than Eskom-supplied electricity.

For more information, visit the City of Cape Town website.

Companies have until 31 August this year, to sign up and register for the initiative.

He explained that the two-pronged approach would work as follows:

• The City of Cape Town will now pay cash to small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) customers for the excess energy they produce and sell back to the City. In the past, these customers could only be compensated by means of credits on their municipal bills.
• In addition, these customers will now be permitted to sell more electricity to the City than they use. In the past, generating customers were required to be net consumers of the City’s energy; they will now be incentivized to become net producers. In this way, our residents will become crucial partners in ending load-shedding in Cape Town.

Hill-Lewis says while these two policy changes will only apply to commercial and industrial customers at first, the City intends to broaden this policy to all generating customers over time, including those with small residential solar PV installations.

Read more here.

Related articles:

• IN FULL: Ramaphosa outlines his #EnergyActionPlan.
• Cyril Ramaphosa: This is how the country will beat loadshedding.

Great morning chatting to business owners about our new policy to buy generating customers' excess electricity from them, for cash.

At first, this will be for larger commercial/industrial SSEG users. We plan to expand this to residential over time. https://t.co/Blg9uwTGsu pic.twitter.com/nW7cVOxXLI

— Geordin Hill-Lewis (@geordinhl) July 25, 2022