By Christine Juta
Pricing beyond the poor
The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) schedule of net metering application charges shows that single phase customers under 100 kW pay a total of USD 632.00 in administration and connection fees including the meter cost of USD 507.00.
Residential consumers are typically served by a single-phase power supply, while industrial and commercial consumers usually use a three-phase supply.
The same schedule also indicates net metering costs for other consumer categories, but I will limit this discussion to residential consumers/solar-home system owners.
I am of the view that the prevailing upfront costs could deter solar home system owners from participating in the net metering program.
The premium pricing effectively relegates many a consumer to be mere spectators of the Zimbabwean clean energy transition.
How does net metering work?
Net-metering is a practice by which distributed energy generators can offset their consumption of grid electricity with local generation.
Simply put, in a net metering scheme, consumers with a solar power generation system receive credits for electricity they feed back to the grid.
According to Statutory Instrument 86 of 2018, participants do not receive monetary compensation but instead receive a credit of 0.9 kWh for every kWh exported to the grid.
This requires a bidirectional meter, to allow two-way flow of electricity – from the grid to the consumer, when the solar system does not meet the consumers energy demand, and from the consumer to the grid, when power generated by the solar system exceeds the consumer’s demand.
An energy consumer who both consumes and produces energy is known as a prosumer.
Net metering thus has potential to reduce the consumer’s utility bill while also supply energy to the grid.
Sounds good, so what is the problem?
Zimbabwe still grapples with a low electrification rate of 40% (80% urban and 14% rural). With increasingly reduced costs of wind and solar PV generation technologies, as well as disruptive innovation in enabling technologies and business models, distributed energy generation has potential to drive access to electricity.
What could be done differently?
Not only are the net metering costs prohibitive, but information on the process is also not easily accessible, at least not from the ZETDC website.
Of course, in an ideal world, the consumer would be at liberty to shop around for a better priced net meter, if more suppliers were permitted to compete in the net meter market.
Yet consumers remain at the mercy of the incumbent. The state-owned monopoly should perhaps consider adopting a pay-as-you-go business model to close the financing gap, instead of demanding a prohibitive upfront cost.
Author Bio
Christine Juta is a PhD Candidate at Power Futures Lab, based at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town. Her research explores the role of new business models and enabling technology innovation in the political economy of the next wave of power sector reforms in Africa, especially focused on market design, system operation and regulation.
