City Power, Eskom reach R3.2 billion settlement in long-running billing dispute
Johannesburg residents have been given some relief after power utilities reached an agreement to resolve their long-running electricity debt dispute.
Image: Pexels
Johannesburg residents have been given some relief after power utilities Eskom and City Power reached an agreement to resolve their long-running electricity debt dispute.
Earlier this year, Eskom threatened to cut power to the City of Johannesburg and City Power over an unpaid bill of R4.9 billion, plus R1.4 billion in current charges.
City Power however had consistently disagreed with the amount. It claimed Eskom had over-billed by more than R3.4 billion, which led to the Minister of Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa appointing the South African National Energy Development Institute (Sanedi) to compile a technical report on the matter.
The report was expected within six weeks but, according to the Minister, was delayed due to the magnitude of the work involved.
In a press briefing on Tuesday, Ramokgopa provided an update on the dispute and announced that the two utilities had settled for R3.2 billion, to be paid over four years.
"Johannesburg City Power will pay R3.2 billion over a period of four years. It's important to appreciate that this is a significant amount, and City Power and the City of Johannesburg have done everything possible to maintain payments on the current account," Ramokgopa said.
"Despite all these difficulties of course there will be challenges from one month to the other but the issue in dispute remained in dispute until we resolved this matter"
He added that R830 million of the original debt had been written off, mainly due to meter reading failures caused by load-shedding.
"First we were able to confirm that there are issues that have to do with the impact of load-shedding remember this period also spanned that period where we had intense load-shedding.
"Where there is an absence of metering you are doing estimates and you can imagine you will not be accurate I think one of the lessons going into the future is we need to ensure that there's bulk metering so that when there's load-shedding it reads zero," Ramokgopa added.
Executive Mayor Dada Morero acknowledged the challenges faced during the negotiation process but praised the efforts of all parties involved in reaching a workable settlement.
"The process that we undertook from November, yes it had its challenges but we want to acknowledge the work that the team put in place to ensure that at the end we can arrive at a settlement that we can all be comfortable with," Morero said.
mthobisi.nozulela@iol.co.za
IOL Business