New electricity tariff – up and up it can go warns councillor
Increased electricity tariff can be up to 30% extra warns councillor and finance expert.
The new municipal tariffs (effective as of July 1) were recently announced by Mogale City Local Municipality (MCLM).
Of major concern is the electricity tariff which showed a tremendous increase of 12.74% on a sliding scale.
The Krugersdorp News has since approached a ward councillor and finance expert Jaco Holtzhausen to elaborate on the matter and explain what effects this may have on residents in Mogale.
He said that he did the math with the Department of Electricity to try and predict what the actual increase would be with the sliding scale factored in. He added that with the new system and sliding scale, the more electricity the user uses, the more the percentage will increase.
“Our preliminary calculations predicted that the average user on a domestic level’s electricity bill can increase between 13 and 25%. Commercial and industrial users may have even had a 16 to 30% increase, depending on how much electricity they use,” Holtzhausen continued.
Holtzhausen added that these increases can negatively affect industries’ income and employment. He continued that it would be cheaper for residents to switch to prepaid electricity.
MCLM communications officer Refilwe Mahlangu said that electricity tariffs are designed to safeguard poor households from increasing electricity prices by implementing inclined blocked tariffs (IBT). She continued that IBT tariff charges increase with increased electricity usage with the assumption that poor households or indigent households do not use a lot of electricity.
“Furthermore, the IBT tariffs are also intended to encourage prepaid electricity accounts by not charging fixed service charges to those customers that choose to be on prepaid usage as it minimises both debt collection and meter reading costs,” Mahlangu added.
Although the tariffs are intended to protect disadvantaged people from increasing electricity prices, the same cannot be said for the elderly in old age homes.
Residentia Moria manager Marita van der Berg told the News the increase will hurt their elderly residents’ pockets because they pay for their own electricity.
“Our residents’ income stays the same while their expenses keep going up. This puts tremendous financial strain on them,” she added.
Holtzhausen concluded that from August 12–13, they can do a proper analysis on the matter, once the bills are sent out to compare them to previous ones.
