Somewhere near the inverter in a South African house with solar panels there is usually a certificate, signed by the electrician who did the wiring. Eskom spent most of this year telling those households the certificate was not enough. This week it accepted that, for the purpose it was arguing about, it is.
Registration is what the fight has been over. Eskom wants every rooftop solar and battery system connected behind a household meter written down on its books, on the grounds that it needs to know how much of it is out there and that some of it may be unsafe. The first deadline was 31 March. Households were told that missing it could mean penalties, widely reported at up to R30,000, a disconnection, or pressure to move onto a new tariff and put down a bigger deposit.
What Eskom has given back
Three of those pressures are gone. The deadline moved to 30 September. The requirement that an installation be signed off by a professional registered with the Engineering Council has been dropped, and a Certificate of Compliance from a qualified electrician now does the job instead. And Eskom has withdrawn the threat to fine or disconnect a customer who simply fails to register, a position its own spokesperson, Daphne Mokwena, confirmed directly to the civil society group OUTA.
None of it was volunteered. OUTA and installers and homeowners have been pushing Eskom on this for months, and the concessions arrived after that engagement rather than ahead of it.
The word Eskom kept
What survives is one sentence with a great deal of room inside it. Deadline or no deadline, Eskom says it will still cut supply to any residential installation it deems unsafe, and nothing published so far says who decides what unsafe means.
OUTA argues that this will not hold. Its position is that a valid Certificate of Compliance is lawful proof that an installation meets the safety standard, issued under the Occupational Health and Safety Act by an electrician the Department of Employment and Labour has registered, and that Eskom would first have to prove that certificate invalid before it could lawfully cut anyone off. It also says Eskom is looking in the wrong place, pointing to the utility's own accident numbers, which attribute very little to unregistered rooftop systems next to the toll from illegal connections in front of the meter. None of this has been tested in court, and Eskom has not answered it in public.
At a meeting on 2 September, Eskom conceded that the vast majority of these installations are still unregistered. It said the 30 September deadline stands anyway.
