Open Energy To The Home (ETTH) to free those prepaid meters from ANC Monopoly Capital.

WHILE residents of Lavender Hill and Steenberg were protesting against prepaid meters and Cape Town City officials sought to blame Eskom for tariff increases — some 20 000 Capetonians attended a two day ‘Solar & Storage Convention’ at the CTICC. As an angry mob gathered along military road, the public were treated to demonstrations of solar power and storage solutions, with storage a key element missing from the debate on renewable energy, and a programme that include Internet of Things (IOT) and smart grids.

It is a stark contrast between those able to afford solar financing options (40k to 60k is not cheap) required to embrace a smarter future which seeks to bring renewable energy into the home, with those left out of the equation. Electricity provision has historically been a state monopoly. Yes there is progress when it comes to feed-in tariffs, but the ‘energy divide’ between South Africa’s rich and poor demonstrates how far we have to go before we can start referring to parity of treatment and equality in energy access.

All of this is occurring during a pivotal “Big Bang” moment for the energy sector, years in the making.

This month literally saw the signing into law by the President of an amendment to the Electricity Regulation Act, one which heralds a market reform of the country’s electricity regulations.

After decades of stagnation, Eskom is finally taking up a new role as a ‘national transmission company’, allowing Independent Power Producers (IPP) to compete with the behemoth in generation of electricity. Forgive me if I sound a little droll, a brave step, better late than never, but totally unacceptable when one realises our government is merely re-configuring a problematic state monopoly, with the resulting pyramid scheme involving the bulk sale of electricity by Metros and Munis to consumers and end-users still very much in place.

Demand Energy To The Home (ETTH)

Yes, us luckless consumer , those who actually pay for electricity instead of stealing it outright, are still being treated as an awkward afterthought by our fancy-pants President and his bloated cabinet.

We are thus issued with a100 day notice of an ‘impending change to our prepaid meters’ which will require new software via an Eskom circular, then a simple insert on SABC news. It appears Parliamentarians don’t use prepaid meters or worry about working in the dark. Zero announcement of tangible assistance to impoverished households, and nothing when it comes to upgrading our meters to a new, supposedly more secure system, with even less debate on the timing of the announcement.

Imagine what would have happened if the ANC had introduced a similar policy affecting mobile phones instead of embracing a big bang in 1994?

Remember that Nokia moment when literally everyone in South Africa had a Nokia cellphone?

What our President was really saying, “from next week, many ISPs will be able to provide the nation with Internet, but not one will be able to sell data directly to the consumer, fibre transmission will remain a monopoly.” Or “Folks, every small town and dorpie will be allowed to be in the Internet business” but “no actual business must operate with the intent to do business“, (apparently making money is a crime in South Africa?) as queues form outside the relevant government departments notorious for lack of service delivery?

Do you honestly think we would have smart phones if our government was the sole supplier of mobile telephony? Thirty years of socialist tinkering with the our economy has produced an entire generation without jobs.

This months Electricity Amendment announcement is really the dramatic equivalent to our Slick President announcing our country will be finally getting colour television, except the whole world has already moved on to HD screens, energy smart grids and streaming services.

Open Net Metering

If I still have your attention, (see my critique here and here) then consider open net metering. Currently our prepaid meters have no specification for connectivity, no external ports with which to interface these meters with a local area network (LAN), and no way of channeling data on the cost of these units from Pretoria, to our household consumption and home automation assistants.

Not only are we faced with a proverbial closed prepaid proprietary system whose data is controlled by the mandarins-in-charge (forgive the pun), but there is no clear path towards ‘time of use’ consumption, autobidding of energy, demand management, future options and a market trajectory which lowers the cost per watt, instead of creating energy inflation.

The global trend is towards concatenation or reduction of supply chains, towards placing a ‘factory on the desktop’, or a snappy logistics company at the factory gate, not the Presidents long-winded version of corporate capital, monopolistic bureaucracy crossed with a pyramid scheme and complicated multi-tier government.

Imagine being able to charge up your batteries when energy is cheaper, then using your storage when consumption is at a peak and expensive?

Where are the incentives from government for households to embrace a better future filled with electric vehicles charged by renewable and solar energy?

If you think this is a topic exclusively for the well-to-do? Think again, because collective housing schemes could also pave the way to collective energy generation at local level and potentially solve many of the problems encountered by the residents of Lavender Hill.

READ: Flogging a Dead Horse

South Africa’s Energy Commons

ENERGY systems linked by information technology could deliver a revolution in energy provision as the PC does for electricity what Windows and Macintosh did for operating systems. Remember the days when the only computers to be found were large mainframes in universities? The personal computer helped consumers escape from the clutches of centralised computing and large corporates like IBM.

Netmetering could revolutionise electricity provision in South Africa. We have reached the point of grid parity, “in which the cost of producing electricity and the cost of purchasing it from Eskom are the same’, points out David Lipshitz of Mypowerstation, one of the many online metering projects which have sprung up on the back of the revolution in connectivity, It is therefore only a matter of time before alternative energy grids powered by the Internet become a reality.

New emerging technologies which allow consumers to produce and share energy are already surpassing the state’s ability to deliver affordable electricity, as centralised power grids become a thing of the past and abundant free electricity becomes a very real possibility. It all comes down to how one defines the energy grid and how the new netmetering projects are going to be structured — whether as energy cooperatives or as micro-enterprises — the result determines whether a new energy commons connected by the Internet becomes a reality.

Free electricity systems and the smart grids of the future could be just around the corner. But first, lets rewind to how we got here.

Problem is the manner in which South Africa has structured its energy system as a cash cow for municipalities which purchase bulk electricity from Eskom, the national energy provider. The City of Cape Town for example, earns billions from the resale of electricity to consumers. Municipalities, according to the National Energy Regulator may be receiving up to 60% of their revenue in this way. There is thus no real incentive to support the new decentralised energy systems which could end up, not only saving consumers money, but also providing cheap, low-cost and near-to-gratis energy for everyone.

Historically, small power stations owned and operated by municipalities were gradually replaced by the centralised power grid. In South Africa, the grid is operated by an apartheid-era parastatel, Eskom which took on a new metastasized form after 1994. Following rolling black-outs, Eskom embarked on an aggressive expansion exercise with successive increases of about 25% a year and most recently announced plans for a 16% rise. Eskom Chief Executive Brian Dames explains the reason for the costs: “we need to continue to invest in the electricity infrastructure which can support higher rates of economic growth and development and extend access to electricity to all South Africans.” In other words, needless infrastructure projects which merely benefit tenderpreneurs.

The solution to the double bind of increasing capital and infrastructure costs and the resulting increase in tariffs appears to be in shifting energy away from being just a commodity (to be bought or sold) into a public good. In other words, a broad social commons. Paul Hartzog of the Forward Foundation sees the Energy Commons as one of the five commons (along with food and culture) which emerges as energy production ‘shifts from massive technological production infrastructures to smaller scale distributed energy production networks’.

The return to the idea of small scale energy provision, whether by Independent Energy Providers (IPP), or via small home installations, has been long coming, and is in part fueled by Eskom’s spiraling energy costs.

Relocating energy provision within a social commons, as advocated by academic John Byrne in a deregulated environment would open the way for the networked energy systems and smart grids also envisioned by the futurist Jeremy Rifkin, in which energy is supplied to consumers by thousands of small producers, much like Internet content is supplied by a network managed by service providers. The obstacles are thus not technological, but rather political.

There is no technical reason why small scale suburban and urban energy collectives cannot organise around energy provision, entering into collective bargaining agreements with their respective municipalities in a framework in which the grid acts as a battery, storing energy when there is a surplus, and providing energy when it is needed. It all depends upon the enabling environment, access to the cables which connect homes to each other and the resulting energy traffic.

The entire feed-in tariff debate which has been going on for almost a decade, hinges upon the idea of consumers being able to feed surplus energy back into the grid, and finding some means of metering the result. Climate Smart’s Hilton Trollip, confirms there is no technical reason why your electricity metre cannot run backwards. Online energy companies such as Mypowerstation have already begun to offer netmetering services in anticipation of deregulation, while the feasibility of net-metering and other technologies which could allow consumer-producers to buy and sell electricity, thereby freeing ordinary citizens from the dictates of centralization, is quite advanced.

Yet it could take decades for Eskom to unbundle its infrastructure, granting consumers access to the “local loop” so far as the traditional grid is concerned. If only the South African government would review its monopolistic grip on the local energy market, the market could be freed to deliver what consumers really need, instead of being dictated to by interest rates, the cost of lending, in an environment in which the only winners are the banks, the broad energy commons could provide the same valued added services we find in other deregulated systems such as mobile phones.

* NOTE: Eskom has asked the National Energy Regulator of SA for an increase of 16%/year for the next five years, starting in April 2013. That comes on top of average annual increases of 25% for two consecutive years, plus a 16% r ise in the year to March 2013. Eskom now charges 61c/kWh, before municipalities add their own charges.
** Wind is the now the cheapest form of electricity generation, with an average price of 89c a kilowatt hour compared to 97c/kWh for Eskom’s new coal-fired power stations.
*** The 2012  bidding round for alternative energy projects should add an additional 3,200 megawatts of power to the national grid by 2020. The government is targeting 1,470 megawatts from onshore wind projects, 400 megawatts from concentrated solar power and 1,075 megawatts from solar photovoltaic projects, Biomass and biogas projects should each generate 47.5 megawatts, small hydropower projects 60 megawatts and other small projects 100 megawatts