By Lindsay Dentlinger
The City of Cape Town plans to spend R2-million upgrading its statistical metering system to determine its exact energy savings.
The mayoral committee (Mayco) has given the city's electricity department the go-ahead to bypass standard procurement processes to appoint an identified company to get the system installed as soon as possible.
But the city says it remains in the dark as to the real reasons for Eskom's about-turn decision last week to shelve load-shedding.
Following a meeting between Eskom and the major metros on Tuesday, mayoral committee member for utility services, Clive Justus, said that although it welcomed the end to load-shedding, it was concerned that there were no alternatives being suggested for saving ahead of winter, when demand would inevitably increase.
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Justus said the decision called Eskom's credibility into question.
Tuesday's meeting is said to have centred largely on policy issues related to energy efficient initiatives, but the power utility was still a long way from implementing these.
Several benchmark and baseline studies to measure energy efficiency and incentives to introduce these measures, were also discussed at the meeting.
Justus said no technical reasons had been offered for the decision to end load-shedding.
After a month of load-shedding in April, Eskom, in a surprise move, ended it last week, without a warning to the city and leaving it wide open to speculation as to the real reasons for doing so.
Eskom said municipalities had done well to meet targets for reduced consumption but it was rumoured that the decision might have come from the political sphere, rather than from Eskom itself, to spare the country the international embarrassment caused by recent damage to sub-stations and other infrastructure as the city prepares for the 2010 World Cup.
"There has been no justifiable reason why load-shedding has stopped," said Justus.
"We welcome it, because (load-shedding) is not the way to go, but we look forward to an immediate and medium-term plan to get out of the crisis and how load and energy consumption will be managed during winter.
"Pulling the plug just before winter makes no sense," Justus said.
In motivating the spending to expand the city's present electricity monitoring system, Justus said that it was unfair to suggest that Cape Town was only saving about 4 percent, when in recent years the city had made enormous sacrifices in times of crisis and had already adopted energy-savings measures.
Following a directive in January that all municipalities reduce consumption by 10 percent, Justus said, it was necessary to scientifically quantify consumption and determine the savings.
Already the City of Cape Town had capabilities far beyond those of its peers to measure its energy consumption.
Justus told the Cape Argus that big companies had demonstrated their willingness to comply in reducing power consumption and had implemented energy- efficient measures, but they criticised Eskom for failing to establish a forum where industry could suggest solutions to the problem.
Justus said there was "fragmented leadership" in dealing with the energy crisis.
- This article was originally published on page 4 of Cape Argus on May 08, 2008
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