Eskom’s LED giveaway: more details emerge

The electricity utility’s plan to reduce residential consumption by offering consumers expensive LED lights and other energy-efficient products completely free of charge is set to run into next year. By Craig Wilson.

Added by Craig Wilson on 19 October 2012.
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It emerged last week that Eskom plans to kit out consumers’ homes with expensive but energy-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) downlighters and other power-saving gear for free. Now, the utility says the project is set to continue well into next year as it strives to reduce SA’s residential power consumption by a gigawatt.

Eskom partner Karebo Systems, one of the companies Eskom has appointed for the project, this week began rolling out free products to consumers. “Karebo is the only company running at the moment, but it will be joined by others in coming weeks,” Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger tells TechCentral.

After Karebo was appointed, Etzinger says Eskom was inundated with applications from potential partners, so much so that it has had to rethink how it appointed them. This resulted in delays to the commencement of the project beyond the original target date of September.

“We need to refine our commercial process to see how we deal with oversubscription,” Etzinger explains. “There will be delays, but the cause is positive. It’s because there’s been such a big uptake of the programme.”

Karebo’s target is to reduce consumer electricity consumption by 80MW by the end of this year. However, that’s only the first phase of the project. Etzinger says Eskom wants to reduce consumption by 1 000MW over the course of the project.

Eskom is footing the bill for all the energy-saving equipment as well as for installation costs — and the downlighters being supplied do not come cheap. The funds are coming from Eskom’s “integrated demand management” programme. The programme gets its resources from a fund that collects a percentage of Eskom’s revenue and designates it to efficiency projects.

“Nersa (the National Energy Regulator of SA) gives us permission to spend a percentage of our income from customers on energy-saving projects,” Etzinger explains. “This project is within the guidelines of the regulator.”

He says projects like this one will allow Eskom to save on both operational and capital costs and the hope is these savings will be passed on to consumers.

Karebo director Ravi Govender says the company’s roll-out will be limited to SA’s six largest metropolitan areas, three in Gauteng, and one apiece in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape.

Karebo expects to replace downlighters, geyser timers and other equipment in 50 000 households before it reaches its target of an 80MW reduction in power consumption. Despite having done no marketing, by the middle of this week Karebo already had more than 15 000 sign-ups from interested consumers.

Andrew Etzinger

Etzinger says Eskom hasn’t been proscriptive with suppliers in terms of the areas they must cover, but metropolitan areas are, understandably, the “low-hanging fruit” because of population density.

“We would certainly welcome suppliers working with rural areas,” says Etzinger. “We expect this to happen with future suppliers, particularly as metropolitan areas are served by the project and suppliers have to look elsewhere.”

Because the project is funded through public funds that are administered by Eskom, Karebo has to keep all bulbs, downlighters and showerheads it replaces for audit purposes.

Govender says that although Eskom hasn’t stipulated which equipment suppliers its partners must use beyond certain core specifications, Karebo has opted for Philips LED downlighters, Eurolux compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and Methven shower heads, which he says are used in a number of European and Middle Eastern hotels.

“We’ve taken into account the security concerns of your average South African,” says Govender. Karebo uses an appointment-based system to arrange installation times with customers, who are given a password that Karebo’s staff must provide upon their arrival. “No one arrives unannounced and our vehicles and staff are branded. We also use tablet computers and mobile phones to take pictures of the installations.”

As of this week, Karebo has 400 two-person teams on the road — one electrical technician and an assistant — but this will grow to 800 by next month.

Installations are done on weekdays or on Saturdays and Govender is confident Karebo will meet its contractual target of completing its installation target by the end of December.

“We’ve previously rolled out 5,5m CFLs in six weeks,” he says. “We’re geared for rapid roll-outs like this.”

Once sign-ups reach a certain threshold, Karebo will prevent further sign-ups, but Govender says those that sign up will be served.  — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=767064553 Gregg Stirton

    There are many other things they could do to save money without mentioning the insane wasteful expenditure on random crap like parties and paying the ‘important people’ around hundreds of thousands of Rands every month.

    Lighting is the least of anyone’s problems. Spend some money on decent light sensors for all the street lights – many areas are on all day.

    Police areas where electricity theft is high. Besides the fact that Eskom clearly state on their site that people who aren’t poor are subsidising those who are, getting illegal connections sorted would help quite a lot.

    Cut off our neighbouring countries. Who as a matter of fact get their electricity for FAR less than any South African does at the moment. Eskom says what we pay mus tbe ‘cost reflective’ – but the other countries pay a fraction of what we do? This is treason by definition.

    LED lights won’t save the world, let alone this country. Proper management (which is something Eskom has yet to witness), less WASTE (you higher-ups know what I’m talking about, I won’t say more) and an arm’s length list of other things needs to happen.

    Somehow though it all looks as if these massive price hikes were planned from the late 90′s to force Eskom into being a cash cow, and now we’re hearing of Telkom being renationalised as well?

    The light bulb idea seems bright at first but won’t really make a dent in much other than Eskom’s ‘profit’ which we are paying for through our necks.

  • Greg Mahlknecht

    >>Spend some money on decent light sensors for all the street lights – many areas are on all day.

    They do this in areas of high cable theft, it’s cheaper than replacing cables or policing the areas. They started this in Cape Town, it worked well there, and they’re doing it more around the country. In safer areas, they do indeed use light sensors. There’s also plans to move to solar-based street lights which combat both cable theft and electricity costs. But all this has nothing to do with Eskom, it’s the municipalities decisions, your rants are misplaced.

    >>Cut off our neighbouring countries.

    I thought this misconception was put to bed years ago during load shedding, they only send electricity out our borders when we have an excess. If I remember correctly, our neighbors pay rates comparable to the heavier industrial local users, which is about half what consumers pay.

    >> LED lights won’t save the world, let alone this country.

    No, but it will save 1000MW. The over-budget Medupi power station is rolling out 800MW every 9 months, as it builds the units. 1000MW is a significant saving. It’s costing R20bil to build that kind of capacity at Medupi, and they can roll out LED lighting a lot faster and a fraction of the cost, than building power stations. I think this is a terrific initiative. They should have done it a lot sooner.
    A plan that Eskom was mulling a while ago was to drop electricity prices in low-usage times, where it’s easy to generate an excess. This is a great idea, and would alleviate a huge load on our grid in a very short time, and make our electricity prices more attractive to big investors. Industry can quite easily change their production lines to use more electricity during night-shift, there’s just no incentive to do so, they’d rather do it during the day when labour’s cheaper. But if you could run your furnaces for half price for 8 hours a day, suddenly the night-shift salary bills are rather inconsequential.

  • Davebee

    Firstly nobody at ESKOM had the slightest idea what I was talking about when I called about this stupid project. Stupid? Yes because we are all adults here and know this will be just another ANC style vehicle of corruption.
    Second stupid? The REAL cause of domestic consumption is water heating, not lights. I know, I have checked out my own domestic consumption for years and lights consume very little.
    Oh, and Ellies one of ESKOM’s main ‘installers’ have also not heard about this idea.
    There are many, many ways to cut electricity costs number one being POWER THEFT and the municipalities are dragging their feet in this area as it is an ANC red button issue (power theft gets votes) that they lack the will and the skill to go after!

  • Archie Makuwa

    Hmm, this has been running since Feb this year

  • Greg Mahlknecht

    >The REAL cause of domestic consumption is water heating, not lights. I know, I have checked out my own domestic consumption for years and lights consume very little.

    Surely you’ve read that this roll-out includes geyser timers as well as LED lights? Downlighters are terribly wasteful. When I calculated the usage in my house, the changeover to LED downlighters would save as much or more electricity than adding a geyser timer.

    >Oh, and Ellies one of ESKOM’s main ‘installers’ have also not heard about this idea.

    Do you actually read the articles you comment on? In the previous one you mentioned how incompetent Ellies were when appointed for a similar initiative a few years ago, and this article says Karebo are the only ones doing it at the moment. I think you need to add yourself to your little list as a “Third Stupid”.

    >There are many, many ways to cut electricity costs number one being POWER THEFT

    Power theft is a problem, but accounts for around 1% of Eskom’s income. A quick look at Eskom’s list of power plants puts their generation capacity at around 50,000MW. The LED replacement has the potential of saving twice as much as solving the power theft problem, and it’s a far more predictable and safer process than chasing down criminals.

    This is obviously a REALLY great initiative, and I for one hope that it’s a great success, it’ll take a massive load off the grid, and if Eskom has to stop being in emergency construction/maintenance mode all the time, it will definitely have a positive influence on electricity prices. I’ve done the sign-up, and am expecting a call in the next week or two – have you at least signed up, or are you waiting for them to stop accepting applications so you can have a little moan about that too?

  • http://wogan.me Wogan

    Hard to imagine a positive article about Eskom, but there you have it. Great initiative on their part here!

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