Illustratiave image | Civil rights organisation #NotInMyName organised a march to Nersa against electricity tariff increase. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla) | Eskom's coal-fired power station in Mpumalanga. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images) | Flickr | Adobe Stock 
As a middle-class person who tries hard to make sure my family has enough electricity and that I’m not screwed in the process, I sometimes have to shake my head in wonder.
It seems impossible for the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) and Joburg’s City Power to do anything right.
Everything they touch seems to turn to... well, I won’t say it but you can work it out for yourself, I’m sure.
The latest instalment in the world’s second-worst epic drama is that Joburg and three other metros have to start their tariff applications from scratch.
As Moneyweb reports, they, and Nersa, have been told that the way they drew up tariffs discriminated against industrial customers in their areas. As a result, those customers went to court and said they were overpaying for electricity, mainly because councils wanted them to support residents.
And Nersa had allowed them to do it.
There are just so many mistakes in this space.
Nersa got its sums wrong last year, which means at some point you and I will have to pay even more for electricity we have already used.
Joburg and Eskom were involved in a long and messy dispute about whether Joburg had paid Eskom enough for the power it had already sold.
And, of course, as my friend Ferial Haffajee has written so often, Joburg residents live without power because City Power can’t keep its systems running.
One of the few flashes of anger I had during the holidays came from my street WhatsApp group, when it emerged City Power was forcing people with solar installations to move from prepaid to post-paid.
I simply cannot understand this. For years, literally years, City Power had been trying to get people to go onto prepaid. Prepaid is better for a million reasons, not least because I know that the billing of it works.
Anyone who has dealt with the council in Joburg will know the pain of post-paid billing. For a decade the City was unable to bill people properly. And because it would insist that you pay up while disputing the bill, people were told to pay bills of R100k for power they had not used.
A major part of this is because so much of the billing was calculated through estimates.
One of the key points Joburg made during its dispute with Eskom was that the power utility had used estimates and that this was unfair.
The irony may be felt rather keenly if City Power is able to go ahead here.
Obviously what City Power wants to do is get customers with solar installations to pay a network charge. Surely it can find a way to get that money without forcing people onto post-paid.
I can’t help but wonder, and yes, hope, that someone, perhaps an Outa or a residents’ group or a DA mayoral candidate, decides to take this all to court.
It would seem to me the City has an obligation to make sure I pay for the electricity that I use. I’m not sure it has the power to decide that I pay it after I use it rather than before?
In the meantime there appears to be no respite from the unbelievable increase in power prices.
This morning it emerged that even the mining industry, in the throes of record-high prices for its products, is battling with the price of power.
All of this means, strangely, that while Eskom has recovered from load shedding, it’s now running out of customers.
The volume of electricity it is selling is declining.
At the start of this year, as the country went back to work, Eskom was able to keep about 4,400MW of generating capacity offline, simply because it wasn’t needed.
Now that’s good news given the comfortable cushion you need to make sure load shedding doesn’t happen again.
But the main reason for this is that the demand for Eskom power is declining because so many people are producing their own, or just making another plan.
And the way City Power is behaving is just going to speed up that process.
There’s nothing to stop someone with means from deciding to cut their link with City Power and invest in a bigger solar battery and a nice generator instead.
And then City Power and Joburg and eventually Eskom will get no money from them at all.
I would really like to hope and pray that cooler and more sensible heads will prevail. That Joburg and the other metros and Nersa will finally get their acts together. That they will do something that makes sense, and that is not just about trying to punish customers, that considers things from the customers’ point of view.
But based on the way they’ve behaved over the past few months, I can’t advise you to hold your breath. DM