Page 28 - Energize December 2022

VIEWS AND OPINION

Feasibility of Cape Town’s plan to limit load

shedding will come down to data

by Roger Hislop, CBI:energy whether there was, in fact, a real change in consumption. The City of Cape Town
will need to check their numbers on the supply side against those produced by the
outh Africa faces another aggregators with the thousands of load control devices under their management.
18 months of regular load Essentially, what this means is that quite a lot of work will need to go into
Sshedding, with unreliable utility exactly how the data is captured and how the incentives are paid out to ensure
power becoming the new normal. that the model is economically viable. Most municipalities in South Africa derive a
But this won’t end until sufficient substantial amount of their revenue from the markup they make on the electricity
generating capacity is added to the they resell from Eskom. The City of Cape Town will be faced with a double
electricity grid to meet demand. whammy – they’ll make less money from the electricity they sell, and they’ll also
To protect locals from the ongoing be paying out ‘discretionary load shedding incentives’.
impacts of load shedding, the City
of Cape Town has recently issued a About the author
tender that will establish third-party Roger Hislop is the energy management systems executive at CBI-electric: low
aggregators who will ostensibly voltage’s newly launched energy management division, CBI:energy.
reward customers for reducing
their power usage when the grid is Contact CBI-electric, Phone 011 928-2000, cbi@cbi-electric.com,
constrained. https://cbi-lowvoltage.co.za
To roll out this plan, these
aggregators will be responsible for
signing up ‘Power Heroes’ comprised
of residential and small-scale
commercial electricity users who
will participate in the initiative on
a voluntary basis. When energy
use needs to be brought down, the
aggregators will switch off agreed-to
non-essential electrical equipment
remotely at the properties of those
who have opted-in through installed
smart devices.
In principle, this sounds great,
but whether it will work or not
comes down to the detail. However,
my first concern is how numerous
loads scattered across thousands
of locations will be turned off.
The technology exists but has not
yet been tested in widespread
deployment. The back-end
management systems will need to be
more complex.
The auditability and quality of the
data that is generated by the smart
devices will be crucial in drawing a
straight line between the voluntary
load shedding intervention and Roger Hislop

energize | December 2022 | 28