Power quotas: Huge fines on cards

Johannesburg - Major Eskom clients who do not save electricity can expect to pay up to eight times as much for electricity from next year.

This development is part of a new energy-saving programme that Eskom is developing on behalf of the department of minerals and energy.

In terms of the programme Eskom will allocate energy quotas to its biggest clients. Initially this will include only consumers using 25GWh of electricity a year. This involves some 250 Eskom customers that consume about half of the country's electricity.

Corrie Visagie, Eskom's head of demand-growth management, acknowledges that the new programme could be regarded as punitive for the wrong people, but he says the converse is also true.

"The new plan is actually a way of protecting consumers who do save. A set of rules is unfortunately necessary to get consumers to save, otherwise they'd take little heed of Eskom's pleas to save electricity.

"Over the next five years electricity will become a scarcer commodity, and therefore a culture of saving needs to be inculcated."

Chris Yelland, an engineering analyst, says three levels of fines will be instituted.

"If consumers fail to save for three months, in the first month they will pay 4.6 times their normal tariff. In the second month they will pay 6.4 times the normal tariff and in month three up to 8.2 times.

"In terms of the proposed sliding scale of fines a consumer could pay R18/kWh at a certain level. The current tariff averages 42c/kWh."

Visagie says Eskom hopes to implement the process in the first quarter of 2009.

The good news is that there will be a strict set of rules to regulate Eskom's application of the new system.

"If a consumer is not satisfied with its quota because it has, for instance, grown substantially since the period on which the quota is based, an appeal process is available in terms of which the consumer will be able to negotiate its quota."

- Sake24