After the Bell: Eskom... just as things were getting better

I sometimes just despair over Eskom.

Just when they’re finally getting so many things right and the power is always on, someone at Megawatt Park seems determined to mess it up.

Someone, somewhere on the globe should run a competition for the world’s worst communications strategy. And if they don’t, perhaps we need to start one, just so that I can nominate Eskom’s communications around home solar installations.

And just as they seem to be about to clear that mess up, another, bigger, crisis looms.

Instead of going ahead with a proper break-up of Eskom into three different parts, it now seems clear Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa and presumably some others are shying away from that.

The first public hint of this came during the holiday season.

As Bloomberg reported, instead of going ahead with three separate standalone entities, the government decided those entities would fall under one holding company.

The timing of this announcement, over the December break, already gives the cynical (I think you know that I identify in this way) reason to be suspicious.

Read more: Municipalities grab short end of Nersa electricity market liberalisation

Then, this morning News24’s Carol Paton reported that this new plan was running into huge opposition.

You can understand why. The whole point of breaking up Eskom into three parts is to introduce competition into our market.

This may seem pretty obvious but it rests entirely on the idea of a neutral grid operator, the person who moves the electricity around.

And without competition our prices are never going to go down (it is generally presumed that proper competition will result in lower prices for you and me… but it is my sad duty to tell you that that has not happened everywhere).

That relies on a completely neutral grid operator – otherwise how on Earth are the various companies supposed to know that they’re trading competitively?

Now, in the past, Eskom could kind of do what it wanted. This was because the government could do what it wanted, which meant that someone in the ANC could do what they wanted.

Those days are over.

This time, Eskom owes so much money to so many people that those people have some real power. And they are likely to use it to force the government to break up Eskom properly.

Unfortunately, this follows other behaviour by Eskom which appears to show they are trying to maintain their dominance.

As Chris Yelland has shown, Eskom has claimed in public to have dropped its legal cases aimed at preventing energy regulator Nersa from granting electricity trading licences to five companies, while keeping those cases active in court.

Then there is the World’s Worst Communication™ title for Eskom’s attitude towards people with solar on their roof.

They’ve gone about this entirely the wrong way.

For a start I really wish Eskom would stop referring to them as “SSEG”.

No braai I’ve ever been to has featured talk about “small-scale embedded generation”. And as yet I have not seen anyone in Joburg with a windmill on their roof, or who, as far as I know, has a store of uranium cunningly disguised as a curiously ticking pool pump.

Everyone calls it solar, Eskom. EVERYONE!!

Then there is the threat of a fine if you don’t register your installation.

I have to say this made my blood boil too.

Thankfully, as Eskom’s general manager for the Central East Cluster at Distribution (he’s an engineer) Kevin Pillay has finally explained on The Money Show (there is a useful transcription here) Eskom has no intention of levying fines for people who don’t register their solar.

As he put it, Eskom does have the “legal power to impose fines for illegal connections, but at this point in time we are not rendering or deeming unregistered small-scale solar generation as illegal”.

Basically, they’re not going to fine you.

Now, it should not have taken an engineer, answering technical questions, to make this clear. Eskom’s top spokespeople, perhaps even the CEO, should have made it crystal clear months ago that there would be no fine.

If only because it is incredibly unlikely that Eskom does have the legal power to fine you for your solar panel or whatever stupid name Eskom wants to call it.

Unfortunately, this kind of catastrophic communication has consequences.

Pillay has also explained, with some patience, that Eskom does have a legitimate interest in knowing whether you have solar and how much power it can generate.

This is a technical area and my own understanding of electricity relates to positive, negative, old-fashioned plugs and the fact that electricity is better run in parallelograms.

Pillay knows a huge amount more than I do and says the problems lies in maintaining the right voltage levels in what he calls a “low-voltage network”.

Now Eskom has created a situation where everyone with solar has got their back up and no one is going to officially register their solar installation in case the power utility gives them grief in the future.

And while Pillay admits that in all the years we’ve had solar installations in residential areas there have been no problems with their “low-voltage network”, he does point to other countries where, eventually, this has led to problems.

Frankly, I think this whole messy mess-up of a mess is a good reminder about how difficult it can be to prise power from an institution.

Because it’s that urge, to keep its power, that is driving all of this very strange behaviour. DM