Business Engineering and EBT's Spark device replace blunt ripple control with smart, device-level geyser management - giving municipalities real-time visibility and residents app-based control. Municipalities recover capital costs within three years, with Eskom subsidising deployments. Energy market liberalisation means grid-intelligent municipalities will be best positioned to trade power competitively.
Philip de Bruin, Managing Director of Business Engineering, is joined by Mornay Viljoen, CEO of Express Broadband Technologies (EBT) - now part of the Business Engineering group - to unpack how modern residential load management technology is transforming the way municipalities manage electricity demand and costs.
The conversation begins with context: municipalities buy electricity from Eskom at time-of-use rates, paying up to R6.80 per kilowatt hour during peak periods while selling to residents at roughly R3.80 - a built-in loss for five hours every day. The old ripple control systems addressed this bluntly, switching geysers and pool pumps off en masse, with no visibility, no device-level data and no ability to manage reconnection. The result was demand spikes, infrastructure trips and call centre overload.
EBT's Spark device changes this fundamentally. Installed at the geyser, it gives municipalities device-level visibility and bidirectional communication, while giving residents control through the Collaborator Citizen App - setting schedules, managing holiday periods and monitoring consumption from their phones. The device is SABS-approved, software-updatable, and designed for a 10 to 15 year lifespan.
Capital costs are recoverable within three years. Eskom actively supports the technology, subsidising deployments at R3 million per megawatt shifted from peak to off-peak - provided the municipality is in good standing with Eskom and measurement is independently verified.
The longer-term opportunity is bigger: the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act (active from January 2025) is unbundling Eskom and liberalising the energy market, allowing municipalities to buy from independent power producers.
The municipalities that invest in grid intelligence now will be positioned to trade electricity across multiple suppliers in real time - a fundamental shift in how municipal energy management works.