As a student at the NWU-Puk – or at any university, I suppose – one soon realises that the true “core module” of your studies is Saving Money 111.
The lecturers are your fellow students, the coursework is experience and your assignments are of a practical nature (surviving until the end of the month). One of the topics that Saving Money 111 covers is buying electricity.
According to some of my “lecturers”, you save money by buying less electricity on a more frequent basis. However, others have said that the opposite – buying more electricity, less frequently – is the way to go. Furthermore, the total amount you buy, the area you live in, the time of the month when you buy and other factors, also supposedly have an influence on the price.
With so much conflicting informa-tion, I decided to subject myself to the one thing a student hates more than lectures on the first (or last) period of a Friday: self-study.
As stated on Potch.co.za, the Tlokwe City Council’s website, the municipality has the responsibility of distributing electricity to the consumers in the areas it serves, including Potchefstroom. Tlokwe buys its electricity in bulk from Eskom, the national wholly state-owned utility, which supplies about 95 per cent of South Africa’s electricity. Eskom has the responsibility of measuring, billing and collecting payments for the amount the customer uses. The metering system that Tlokwe uses gives a choice between a credit meter and a prepayment meter.
Electricity prices are in a state of flux and will continue to increase by at least 8 per cent year-on-year until 2018. Eskom increased its prices by 12,69 per cent on 1 April 2015 and 9,4 per cent on 1 April 2016, while municipalities increase their prices on 1 July each year. The National Energy Regulator of SA (NERSA) has approved a 7,6 per cent increase for Tlokwe, effective from 1 July 2017.
Electricity prices are divided into several steps or blocks (incline block tariffs). The first block is the cheapest, but as the customer purchases more electricity units during the month, consumption moves into the next block, which means units become more expensive. At the end of the month, the cycle is reset and the customer starts the new month in block 1 again. The move to the next block is not at all affected by whether or not the purchases are spread over many transactions or if all the electricity is part of one transaction.
If you purchase 300 units (kWh) at the beginning of the month, those units will cost you:
300 * R1.3074 = R392.22.
Then if you purchase 400 units later in the same calendar month, those will cost you:
300 * R1.5076 + 100 * R1.7840 = R452.28 + R178.40 = R630.68.
Therefore, since the blocks increase in price, customers can save money by not buying more electricity than they will use during the month. The more you consume, the more you pay per unit!
It is much better to wait until the next month and start buying again at the low price. Another option to consider is one of the most simple: save money by saving electricity.
