Save electricity now and you’ll pay for it later

Hajira Amla |31 March 2008

The Department of Minerals and Energy last week announced plans to implement new legislation that would enforce hefty fines on Eskom’s residential and business customers that did not make a 10% saving on their energy bills. The new law, which has already sailed through Parliament and is expected to be implemented by July, would see home owners and businesses required to make the reduction based on previous months’ energy usage.

Am I the only person asking the obvious question here? Let’s say I am a good and patriotic South African citizen who is concerned by the energy crisis and has been moved by the government and Eskoms heartfelt pleas to save as much energy as possible. I’d estimate that at least 60% of households in South Africa have already made some kind of effort to curb their power consumption, whether by switching their geysers off during the day, fitting energy-saving lightbulbs or just switching appliances and lights off when they are not needed. The South African public is collectively quite proud of their individual efforts and expects to be patted on the back by Eskom.

So I’ve cut my electricity consumption by as much as 15% and I’m happy about that. Then I hear that Eskom is hiking the price of electricity by roughly 50%, with another planned increase of 50% on the cards in 2009 (it’s just about the only thing that’s ever come out of Alec Irwin’s mouth that I believe) and now my little personal good Samaritan’s effort feels like a hollow, empty victory.

Then when the law is implemented in July, they will look at my reduced consumption in May and June and tell me I have to save another 10%! How should I do that? Should my family eat only raw foods? Take cold showers? What will their next step be - to make the possession and use of heaters illegal? In what forecasters are predicting to be one of our harshest winters in the past few years, do they seriously expect people to shiver in the dark?

Let’s have a look and see what alternatives to electricity the government has provided us with, shall we? Gas is astronomically priced and good luck to you if you can find any in the coming months. Illuminating paraffin is going up by R1.57 cents a litre on Wednesday, so it’s not really going to be very economical to run a paraffin stove or paraffin lamps. As for those who bought diesel generators for those long, dark winter nights, the price of diesel is set to increase by a shocking R1.30 per litre on Wednesday.

The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that the government couldn’t care less about providing us with a solution as long as they have the opportunity to line their pockets with our hard-earned money - by fining us for the terrible crime of caring enough to reduce our consumption before July and then being unable to reduce it any further.

The moral of the story? I’m unapologetically refusing to save electricity now so that I can avoid paying fines after July. Thank you to Eskom, the Department of Minerals and Energy and the government’s general ineptitude and lack of forward planning for making us do the crazy things we do.