How City SSEG registration actually works

Your Maximum Export Capacity is the ceiling the City sets on how much you may push back into the grid. It is derived from your electrical supply — your main breaker rating and whether you are single- or three-phase — and not from the size of your inverter or array.

In practice that means three common positions:

• Single-phase 60A — the standard residential supply across most of Cape Town, and the lowest export ceiling of the three. A large system on a 60A supply will typically be authorised to export less than its inverter can produce.
• Single-phase 80A — a higher ceiling on the same single-phase supply. Some properties already have it; others can apply to upgrade.
• Three-phase — the highest ceiling, and the only realistic option for larger residential systems that want to export everything they generate.

An MEC below your system size is not a rejection. It means you export up to the cap and self-consume the rest, which for most households is still the large majority of the value. If it is worth upgrading your supply in your case, we will say so — the upgrade is its own application to the City, with its own cost and its own timeline.

We confirm the exact cap for your property against your supply before anything is submitted.

Older properties in parts of Cape Town are still fed by an overhead line from a street pole rather than an underground cable. An export connection has to come in underground, so that supply must be converted before the City will authorise export.

If your supply comes in overhead, work on the basis that this applies to you. It is not a rare exception and it is not discretionary — read it as a cost of exporting from your property until we confirm otherwise.

This is the single largest conditional cost on this page, and the one most likely to change your answer. It is a City-quoted service connection change, not an electrical repair, and it is charged by supply rating — a 60A single-phase conversion and an 80A three-phase conversion are different quotations.

We check this at step two, before you have paid for anything beyond the deposit, precisely because it can change whether exporting is worth doing at all. If the conversion cost does not pay back against your likely credits, we will tell you that rather than submit the application.

The City installs its bi-directional AMI meter in a compliant meter box at the front property boundary. Many older homes have the meter inside the house, in a garage, or behind a locked gate — positions the City no longer accepts for a new metering installation.

Where the existing position is non-compliant, a compliant boundary meter box and the cabling to reach it have to be provided at the property owner's cost, by a contractor you appoint. It is not part of the City's meter quotation and it is not part of our fee.

We flag it as early as we can see it, but the City's own inspection is what settles the question definitively.

You cannot export on a prepaid meter. Export customers move to a billed SSEG-capable Home User account with an AMI meter. No more buying tokens, no more entering twenty digits at the keypad.

The trade-off is real and worth understanding before you commit. The Home User tariff carries two monthly fixed charges that prepaid does not — a network access and administration charge, and a separate AMI meter administration fee — and it arrives as a bill rather than as a purchase you control. Count both when you do the maths; one of them is easy to miss. Your export credits are applied against your consolidated municipal account — electricity, rates, water and solid waste — so the credit shows up as a smaller total bill rather than as a payment to you.

For a household exporting meaningfully, the credits comfortably exceed both charges. For a small system on a low-consumption property, they may not. We run that comparison for your system during the eligibility check, using the current figures for both charges, and if the numbers do not work we will say so.

SSEG registration is an electrical process, but it does not override the City's planning and heritage rules. Two things can bring a second approval into play:

• Panel height above the roof plane. Panels mounted flush to the roof are generally treated as part of the roof. Two thresholds matter: 1.5 m above the roof surface, and 600 mm above the highest point of the roof. An array that crosses either can require building-plan approval. Tilt frames are the usual reason — you can walk outside and check yours against those numbers.
• Heritage status. Properties older than 60 years, and anything in a heritage protection overlay zone, can require heritage consent for visible roof changes. Much of the City Bowl, Woodstock, Observatory and the older southern suburbs are affected.

Where departmental clearance is required, it is a gate rather than a side track. The City will not consider your SSEG application until that clearance is in hand — so a heritage-affected property is not running two processes in parallel, it is running one after the other. Budget the time accordingly.

This clearance runs on its own timeline and is not included in our fee. If your property is likely affected, we will tell you at the eligibility stage so that you are choosing to take it on rather than discovering it.

Most failures are correctable, and most are documentary rather than physical — a missing inverter datasheet, an account-holder name that does not match the municipal account, or system details on the application that do not match what is actually on the roof. The site visit at step three exists largely to stop that last one.

The harder ones are real:

• An inverter not on the approved list. There is no paperwork route around this. The inverter is replaced or the system is registered as non-export.
• An installation that does not meet the standard. Remedial electrical work by a registered contractor, at your cost, before resubmission.
• Network constraints in your area. The City limits export in parts of the network that are already saturated. This is a property-location fact, not something an application can argue with.

In every case we explain the reason and what remediation would take. Approval rests with the City, not with us. The second R2,000 is due only once the City issues your metering quotation, so an application that fails before that point is never invoiced for it. Where a rejection is within our control — documentation, submission, or a compliance issue our screening should have caught — we refund it if you have already paid. The first R2,000 covers the site inspection and the ECSA-registered professional, who is paid for the assessment and not for the outcome, so it stands either way.

Export is not the only outcome worth having, and for some properties it is the wrong one. If your MEC is low, your supply is overhead, your meter position needs rebuilding, or your consumption is small enough that the Home User fixed charge swallows the credits, non-export registration is the better answer.

The City still requires your grid-tied system to be registered even if you never feed a single unit back. Non-export registration is a shorter process: no AMI meter, and no metering quotation. If you are on prepaid, nothing about your meter changes. If you are on a credit meter, the City replaces it with a prepaid meter at its own cost. Either way you end up legal, insurable, and clean for a future sale.

Our fee is R3,000 — R1,000 less than the export path, on the same terms: R1,500 on booking, and R1,500 once the City approves your registration. That includes the ECSA professional sign-off. A grid-tied system needs a registered professional to sign it off whether it exports or not, so there is no engineer for you to find and no engineering invoice arriving separately afterwards.

What you save is not our fee but the City's. The R6,651.90 AMI meter does not arise, there is no metering quotation and no meter installation to wait on, and your metering position is left exactly as it is. It is a shorter process on the same terms, not a thinner service.

If the eligibility check says export does not pay for your property, that is what we will recommend — see registration without export.