The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality has approved an amount of R500 million to install low pressure solar water heaters for households that have benefited from government’s low cost housing programme.
The Ekurhuleni metro has approved R500m to install low pressure solar water heaters in households that have benefited from government’s low cost housing programme.
The three-year roll out programme will begin in this first quarter of 2011 and is aimed at reducing poverty levels by significantly helping residents save on energy costs, while at the same time contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions.
Ekurhuleni executive mayor, Mondli Gungubele said the programme was part of the National Solar Water Heating programme, launched in April last year to get one million solar water heaters set up in homes across South Africa by 2014.
“The roll out of low pressure solar water heaters to low cost house owners speaks to the core of our efforts to save expenses in respect of the purchasing of electricity, thereby dealing with poverty and underdevelopment,” said Gungubele.
By striving to achieve the 2014 target, Gungubele said he was confident this will go a long way towards meeting another national target of ensuring that by 2013, 10 000 gigawatt-hours of final energy consumption is supplied by renewable energy.
The households to benefit from the programme are in Daveyton, Etwatwa, Duduza, Kwa-Thema and Tsakane.
“By switching to solar water heating, each of the households in these areas could drastically help reduce carbon emissions, a 150-litre solar water heater, which is adequate for two to three people, can save 4.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, or 1.6 tons of carbon dioxide,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Gungubele announced that the metro will be putting more effort to reducing the 121 000 number of houses in proclaimed areas, which are without electricity.
“We need to expedite the process of getting these houses connected. This situation demands that we work differently and smarter,” he said.
The focus areas include Palmridge Phase 2, Tinasonke, Eden Park, Extension 4 and Esselen Park. – BuaNews
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Solar heating could be part of the answer to ESKOM’s supply problems. It is not, however, going to have any major effect until the government finds some way to negate the tendency of solar geyser installers to merely increase the price of installation in tandem with ESKOM increasing their rebate. I have weighed up the cost of installing a solar geyser and am not sure that the cost is not more than the savings one achieves by installing it. Particularly if you take into account that the guarantee is often only 5 years. One of the websites I looked at only covered the labour for one year ! As the solar geyser installers obviously cannot be trusted one wonders if the government shouldn’t look at other ways to encourage the installation of solar geysers. In Germany (apparently the world leaders in solar heating according to a recent article in National Geographic) any excess energy generated is fed back into the national grid with credits given to the individual consumer who generated this excess. Is it too much to ask for such forward thinking in RSA ?. This would be more encouragement to consumers to go to the expense of installing solar geysers and, in the long term, would assist in reducing the expense. I have also found it quite difficult to assess the best system to install and think that ESKOM should take the initiative here and give some unbiased guidelines on their website. My feeling is that until such time as the above problems are aggressively addressed we are not going to see much investment by the public in solar heating. This is really a great pity as we - the consumer – could be assisting ESKOM to solve part of their problems by investing our funds in solar geysers. - Will New
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