Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa detailed the revised electricity pricing policy at a Pretoria briefing on Tuesday, and two provisions matter for anyone paying a business electricity account.

Eskom and municipalities will be barred from recovering unpaid customer debt through tariffs, which the minister says accounts for between 1% and 2.5% of what you currently pay. Nersa will also have to publish a rolling 10-year price forecast. The policy is gazetted for public comment on Friday.

Set that 1% to 2.5% against the record. On the minister's own figures, tariffs have risen more than 900% since 2007 while inflation ran roughly 150%. Annual increases went 15.63%, 9.61%, 18.7%, 12.7% and 12.74% across the past five years, plus 8.76% for Eskom direct customers on 1 April. The policy reverses none of it.

Municipalities will instead have to justify their costs through cost-of-supply studies, though their arrears to Eskom sit at about R110-billion, and Eskom's distribution unit cannot be separated out until that is resolved. The forecast requirement is aimed at heavy industry trying to compute return on investment.

The policy also sets rules for bilateral deals between generators and off-takers, and widens Negotiated Pricing Agreements beyond distressed firms to those said to serve the national interest.

TechCentral reported the briefing and noted that Ramokgopa did not say who decides which companies qualify for concessional rates, on what criteria, or how the discounts would be funded. MyBroadband reported the minister's framing ahead of the briefing, promising cheaper power alongside cost-reflective tariffs. Engineering News documented the Nersa miscalculation that produced the higher-than-planned April increase.

Take the 1% to 2.5%, because it is real money and it corrects something indefensible. But it does not dent a 900% rise, and the two provisions worth actually reading sit elsewhere. The 10-year forecast is the first time you will be able to model electricity as a known input cost rather than an annual surprise, which changes any capital decision with a five-year payback.

The bilateral generator rules are the door to buying power from somebody other than Eskom. Then there is the widened Negotiated Pricing Agreement, under which government may grant concessional rates to companies not in distress, on national interest grounds, with no published criteria and nobody named as the decision-maker. That is the clause to comment on by Friday.

You might also like our piece on the revised electricity pricing policy and what cost-reflective really means, the Eskom distribution agency agreements running ahead of Nersa, and how South Africa's business regulation scores on restrictiveness.

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