Cape Town mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, says talks are underway for all residents of the metro to get their electricity from the City.
The Municipality is on a mission to move away from Eskom entirely.
Currently, around 85% of the City’s population is serviced by the Municipality – the rest are direct Eskom customers.
The Mayor says he wants those remaining households to be supplied by the City as well.
However, Eskom wants the municipality to then also take over all the infrastructure in these areas as well.
Hill-Lewis says they can’t agree on that now because they’re not sure what condition the system is in.
Last month, Hill-Lewis further expanded efforts for Cape Town to become energy secure with the announcement of the City’s latest energy purchasing scheme.
It entails the City paying cash to commercial and industrial electricity generators to feed any excess energy they produce back to the City’s grid.
He says “generating customers” can now sell more electricity to the City than they buy from it as well.
“The City of Cape Town will now pay commercial customers for the power they send us. And, you can be a net producer – produce more than you use. It is absolutely our intention to roll this out for residential customers in the future. The way that this is received by our commercial customers in the months ahead, will show how quickly and how easily and simply we can do that.”
