Andrew Louwrens has a garden that looks like a monument to responsible citizenship‚ bristling with rainwater tanks and solar panels.

But he has been on tenterhooks since a letter arrived from the City of Cape Town late last year accusing him of having an illegal solar electricity installation.

“I installed the system in good faith in 2012. I was doing my bit for society‚” said the 78-year-old former SA Rugby administrator.

“I also didn’t want big electricity bills when I retired‚ (and I have been) happily exporting excess electricity into the grid.”

Then the council’s letter arrived in November‚ accusing him of having an illegal small-scale generation system because it did not comply with regulations introduced since it was installed.

Things got worse on Christmas Eve when the council threatened to cut off his electricity. “I burst out crying‚” said Louwrens‚ who had a triple heart bypass last year.

Michel Malengret‚ an associate professor at the University of Cape Town who owns the company that installed Louwrens’s system‚ said: “At the time there were no regulations. Using solar energy was very expensive then and government’s impression was that it would never happen.”

The inverter he installed for Louwrens was approved globally but it is not approved locally because it predates the regulations‚ and power utility Eskom says it still views “the embedded generation connections‚ made without the required approval and permission‚ as illegal”.

According to Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for energy‚ Xanthea Limberg‚ a 2010 by-law said residents had to make sure installations complied with technical standards‚ including “replacing non-compliant inverters with units that are acceptable to the city”.

 But Malengret said customers’ hands were tied by the expense of such replacements.

“Council only adopted regulations two years ago‚ so now those like Louwrens who installed solar beforehand must fork out another R7 000 for a new inverter. They must then pay a fixed charge of R13 a day for the ‘privilege’ of exporting excess energy into the grid.”

He said the council “trumpets the tiny incentives you get back when doing this”‚ but underplayed the R4 745 annual charge for the daily tariff.

The option Louwrens and Malengret suggest for people in the same situation is to be partially on the grid and partially off the grid‚ with a bank of expensive batteries to store electricity.

Malengret said Eskom had made it “virtually impossible” for “solar guys to work with the grid” but predicted there would be “an avalanche” of people going off the grid as the price of batteries came down.

- The City of Cape Town states on its website that without regulations‚ there is a risk to consumers and its staff.

“Safety and the power quality of the electricity grid will be compromised by illegal connections that use the wrong equipment or by adding unplanned generation capacity to a part of the network not designed to carry it.”

It adds that a household’s safety could also be compromised by exposing it to the risk of electrical fires and electric shocks from poor quality installations that do not meet national wiring standards.