The City of Joburg (CoJ) will start punishing households with smart meters from July 2024 using load limiting if it finds that they are consuming a “high” amount of electricity.
In light of surging power usage that it said threatened to collapse its distribution grid, the metro’s electricity utility, City Power, announced extensive plans to curb demand.
Much of the focus was on load reduction in areas with high levels of illegal connections, which threaten to overload transformers, substations, and other electrical infrastructure.
However, the utility also said it would start implementing load limiting in households with its smart meters in July 2024, with no mention of a condition that the area be overloaded with demand.
This is surprising given that this demand-side management mechanism has only ever been used by the CoJ and Eskom as an option during load-shedding.
City Power seemingly attempts to obfuscate the impact of the plan by stating that load limiting would “further assist customers in saving energy without switching them off completely.”
In reality, load limiting will take away a substantial part of those residents’ maximum electricity supply capacity.
Load limiting reduced the amps that a house is allowed to pull from 60A to 10A, meaning that peak consumption drops to around 2.3kW.
That is insufficient for running demanding appliances like electric stoves and high-capacity electric geysers or using multiple medium-draw appliances simultaneously.
Some might argue the practice of load reduction, aimed specifically at areas where numerous households are complicit or aware of illegal connections, has some justification.
However, the plan to implement load limiting, regardless of such activities, could be considered political overreach.
The Free Market Foundation’s policy head, Martin van Staden, warned last year that load limiting was “tyranny masking as convenience”.
Van Staden said he experienced load limiting being implemented in his suburb on multiple occasions when load-shedding had been suspended.
He said it would be reasonable for South Africans to suppose that load limiting will come to an end if load-shedding is suspended, but pointed out that the smart meters they let utilities like City Power and Eskom install in their homes would remain.
Van Staden warned it was easily conceivable that the government would use load-limiting to control general demand for electricity in the future.
“And it goes without saying that as South African politics gets increasingly heated, and government perhaps increasingly malicious, political victimisation of households or even businesses cannot be entirely ruled out.”
Van Staden recommended that households resist the installation of smart meters for as long as possible and go as off-grid as far as they can afford to.
The CoJ first started running limited trials of load limiting in April 2015, when Parks Tau was its mayor.
At the time, Tau said load limiting provided a solution to sufficiently reduce the metro’s demand to avoid stage 1 and stage 2 load-shedding altogether and partially reduce power cuts during stage 3.
To implement load limiting, a distribution utility must be able to measure households’ power consumption at all times.
This necessitated the installation of tens of thousands of smart meters, which were rolled out in numerous areas, including Ruimsig, Hyde Park, Randburg, Radiokop, Grobblerpark, Greenstone, Bryanston, Robertsham, Eagle Canyon, Westcliff, Parkhurst, Parkmore and Parkwood.
However, it is unclear whether CoJ ever implemented load limiting en masse, as news of the initiative died down in the years that followed.
Load limiting only started attracting attention again in 2023, when Eskom began piloting the mechanism with some of its direct customers, and City Power started rolling out new smart meters for load limiting.
The system warns customers via SMS to reduce their consumption when their load-shedding slot is coming up.
When they would have had load-shedding, the household can continue using electricity but may not exceed 10 amps of current. That way, households have at least some power instead of none at all.
This has now changes, with City Power planning to implement load limiting on these households outside load-shedding.
Aside from forced electricity savings, the CoJ’s decision to implement load limiting when there is no load-shedding has no upside for households.
MyBroadband asked the City of Joburg for feedback on its new load limiting plan, but it did not comment by publication.